Now in the Wolf's Ravine Agrenev recalled this incident, and he brooded bitterly over the certainty that no one would ever deliver a slap in the face on his account! What vulgarity—slaps in the face!… and a slap in the face was no solution.
It was now autumn, and as he stood in the ravine waiting for Olya, the cranes flew low over his head, stretching themselves out like arrows and crying discordantly. A wintry sulphurous light overspread the eastern sky, and the blue crest of the Vega shone out above him tremendous and triumphant, sweeping up into the very heart of the flaming sunset.
On a sudden, Olya arrived, her figure darkly silhouetted an instant— a tiny insignificant atom—against the vastness of the hill and sky as she stood poised on the brink of the ravine; then she clambered down its precipitous side to Agrenev.
Alexander Alexandrovitch Agrenev, mining engineer and married man, and Olya Andreevna Golovkina!
* * * * * * *
She was a school teacher, who, after passing through the eight classes of her college, now resided with her aunt. She was always known as Olya Golovkina, although she bore the ancient Russian surname made famous in the time of Peter the Great by Senator Golovkin. But even in the time of Peter the Great this name had sunk into the gutter and had left in this town a street Golovkinskaya, and in that same Golovkinskaya Street a house, by the letting of which Olya's aunt made her living.
Agrenev knew that the aunt—whose name he had never heard—was an old maid, and that she had one joy—Olya. He knew she sat at her window without a lamp throughout the evenings, waiting for Olya; and that for this reason her niece, on leaving him, went round by the back- way, in order to obviate suspicion.
Nothing was ever said of the aunt in a personal way; the name was uttered only indirectly, as though applying to a substance and not to a human being.
Olya was a very charming girl, of whom it was difficult to say anything definite: such a pretty provincial maid, like a slender willow-reed.
The town lay over hillocks and fields and the ancient quarries, all its energies flowing out from the factory at the further end—and a casual conversation which occured in the spring at the beginning of Agrenev's acquaintance with Olya was characteristic alike of the town and of her. Agrenev had said apropos of something: