“All right!”
My friend was loathsome. If I had not been fastidious, perhaps I would have crushed him like a beetle, when he, shivering as if with fever, asked me to leave him alone with Urbenin's wife. He, the debilitated anchorite, steeped through and through with spirits and disease, wanted to take the poetic “girl in red” who dreamed of an effective death and had been nurtured by the forests and the angry lake! No, she must be miles away from him!
I went up to her.
“I am going,” I said.
She nodded her head.
“Am I to go away? Yes?” I asked, trying to read the truth in her lovely, blushing little face. “Yes?”
With the very slightest movement of her long black eyelashes she answered “Yes.”
“You have considered well?”
She turned away from me, as one turns away from an annoying wind. She did not want to speak. Why should she speak? It is impossible to answer a long subject briefly, and there was neither time nor place for long speeches.
I took up my hat and left the room without taking leave. Afterwards, Olga told me that immediately after my departure, as soon as the sound of my steps became mingled with the noise of the wind in the garden, the drunken Count was pressing her in his embrace. And she, closing her eyes and stopping up her mouth and nostrils, was scarcely able to keep her feet from a feeling of disgust. There was even a moment when she had almost torn herself away from his embraces and rushed into the lake. There were moments when she tore her hair and wept. It is not easy to sell oneself.