When he was sitting in the café he often thought to himself, “There’s a great woman”—and he was a little puzzled why he thought this because his need of her was so entirely different from any need he seemed to remember having possessed before.
There was no swagger in him about her, the swagger he had always felt for his conquests with women. Yet there was not a trace of shame—he was neither proud nor shy about Lydia Passova, he was something entirely different. He could not have said himself what his feeling was—but it was in no way disturbing.
People had, it is true, begun to tease him:
“You’re a devil with the ladies.”
Where this had made him proud, now it made him uneasy.
“Now, there’s a certain Lydia Passova for instance, who would ever have thought——”
Furious he would rise.
“So, you do feel——”
He would walk away, stumbling a little among the chairs, putting his hand on the back of every one on the way to the door.
Yet he could see that, in her time, Lydia Passova had been a “perverse” woman—there was, about everything she did, an economy that must once have been a very sensitive and a very sensuous impatience, and because of this everyone who saw her felt a personal loss.