"You, Kseniya Ippolytovna?" Polunin exclaimed joyfully.
"Yes, yes … Oh yes!… I am tired of roaming about and being always on the brink of a precipice, so I have come to you … across the fields, where there is snow, snow, snow and sky … to you, the seeker…. Will you take me? Have you forgiven me that July?"
Polunin's face was grave and attentive as he bent over the telephone:
"Yes, I have forgiven," he replied.
* * * * * * *
One long past summer, Polunin and Kseniya Ippolytovna used to greet the glowing dawn together. At sundown, when the birch-trees exhaled a pungent odour and the crystal sickle of the moon was sinking in the west, they bade adieu until the morrow on the cool, dew-sprinkled terrace, and Polunin passionately kissed—as he believed—the pure, innocent lips of Kseniya Ippolytovna.
But she laughed at his ardour, and her avid lips callously drank in his consuming, protesting passion, only to desert him afterwards, abandoning him for Paris, and leaving behind her the shreds of his pure and passionate love.
That June and July had brought joy and sorrow, good and ill. Polunin was already disillusioned when he met Alena, and was living alone with his books. He met her in the spring, and quickly and simply became intimate with her, begetting a child, for he found that the instinct of fatherhood had replaced that of passion within him.
Alena entered his house at evening, without any wedding-ceremony, placed her trunk on a bench in the kitchen, and passing quickly through into the study, said quietly:
"Here I am, I have come." She looked very beautiful and modest as she stood there, wiping the corner of her mouth with her handkerchief.