This “most worthy person” was represented by a girl of about nineteen, with beautiful fair hair, kind blue eyes and long curls. She was dressed in a bright red frock, made in a fashion that was neither that of a child nor of a young girl. Her legs, straight as needles, in red stockings, were shod with tiny shoes that were small as a child's. All the time I was admiring her she moved about her well-rounded shoulders coquettishly, as if they were cold or as if my gaze bit her.
“Such a young face, and such developed contours!” whispered the Count, who from his earliest youth had lost the capacity of respecting women, and never looked at them otherwise than from the point of view of a spoilt animal.
I remember that a good feeling was ignited in my breast. I was still a poet, and in the company of the woods, of a May night, and the first twinkling of the evening stars, I could only look at a woman as a poet does.… I looked at “the girl in red” with the same veneration I was accustomed to look upon the forests, the hills and the blue sky. I still had a certain amount of the sentimentality I had inherited from my German mother.
“Who is she?” the Count asked.
“She is the daughter of our forester Skvortsov, your Excellency!” Urbenin replied.
“Is she the Olenka, the one-eyed muzhik spoke of?”
“Yes, he mentioned her name,” the bailiff answered, looking at me with large, imploring eyes.
The girl in red let us go past her, turning away without taking any notice of us. Her eyes were looking at something at the side, but I, a man who knows women, felt her pupils resting on my face.
“Which of them is the Count?” I heard her whisper behind us.
“That one with the long moustache,” the schoolboy answered.