“I want you to become bright and agreeable and charming, Volodia, and this you can only accomplish through the influence of women. Why, what a horrid cross face you have! You ought to laugh and talk. Honestly, Volodia, don’t be a stick! You are young yet; you will have plenty of time for philosophising later on. And now, let me go. I’m in a hurry to get back. Let me go, I tell you!”
She freed herself without effort, and went out of the summer-house singing a snatch of song. Volodia was left alone. He smoothed his hair, smiled, and walked three times round the summer-house. Then he sat down and smiled again. He felt an unbearable sense of mortification, and even marvelled that human shame could reach such a point of keenness and intensity. The feeling made him smile again and wring his hands and whisper a few incoherent phrases.
He felt humiliated because he had just been treated like a little boy, and because he was so shy, but chiefly because he had dared to put his arms around the waist of a respectable married woman, when neither his age nor, as he thought, his social position, nor his appearance warranted such an act.
He jumped up and, without so much as a glance behind him, hurried away into the depths of the garden, as far away from the house as he could go.
“Oh, if we could only get away from here at once!” he thought, seizing his head in his hands. “Oh, quickly, quickly!”
The train on which Volodia and his mother were to go back to town left at eight-forty. There still remained three hours before train time, and he would have liked to have gone to the station at once without waiting for his mother.
At eight o’clock he turned toward the house. His whole figure expressed determination and seemed to be proclaiming: “Come what may, I am prepared for anything!” He had made up his mind to go in boldly, to look every one straight in the face, and to speak loudly no matter what happened.
He crossed the terrace, passed through the drawing-room and the living-room, and stopped in the hall to catch his breath. He could hear the family at tea in the adjoining dining-room; Madame Shumikin, his mother, and Nyuta were discussing something with laughter.
Volodia listened.
“I assure you I could scarcely believe my eyes!” Nyuta cried. “I hardly recognised him when he began to make love to me, and actually—will you believe it?—put his arms around my waist! He has quite a way with him! When he told me that he loved me, he had the look of a wild animal, like a Circassian.”