With the last word he pressed his lips to hers. But that moment she, too, gained unexpected strength, and in a flash she was some steps away from him, very pale now and trembling throughout her whole body.
"This is too much of nature!" cried she.
Her head was erect, and from her eyes came flashing sparks, which soon melted, however, into cold irony. Shrugging her shoulders, with a smile she exclaimed:
"Dieu! que c'etait vulgaire!"
Then holding her skirt with both hands, as if she wished not to take one atom of dust from that room with her, she went out into the shop; the baron saw her talk to the tailor for a moment with her usual coolness, and then turn to go with the ordinary words of brief leave-taking.
But now Irene sitting there on that tall stool at the window, surrounded by the fading gleam of the blue watered-silk, and against the background of the pane which was covered with a whitish gloom, seemed a statue with a delicate bust, and a somewhat prolonged profile settled in stony fixedness. The "cry of life" possessed as words the charm of novelty and daring, but when changed into an act it roused in her every feeling of offence and maiden modesty. The shaggy beast had ventured out too far from behind the heliotropes, and had given forth too rank a smell of the den and the troglodytes. "It is vulgar!" cried she to the baron, but she understood immediately that what had taken place was neither new, nor a rare thing, but as old as the human race and as vulgar as the street is. The tailor's shop full of people, the ceaseless ringing at the door-bell, the noise of selling and buying, the passage beyond the window—is the street. A kiss received on the street. Street adventure! A quiver shot downward through her shoulders. Before her imagination passed the wretched forms of women trailing in the dusk of evening along the sidewalks. On her inclined face a blush came out; that painted pot called maiden, modesty, under the form of inherited instinct and woman's pride, was laboring in her untiringly and painfully. After a while its place was taken by disgust beyond expression.
The baron, whose single charm was in his subtlety, appeared now as a vulgar figure. That kind of mutual love, which she had thought they felt for each other, when closely analyzed, reminded her of pictures in which Fauns with goats' beards were chasing through the forest after Nymphs. On Irene's lips a jeering, almost angry smile, now fixed itself. What did he say: "a sixth sense." Why a sixth sense in this case? Empty words! The baron jeers at painted pots, but he makes them himself, and paints them in the ancient colors. An idyl is an old thing, and a den is old also, but the idyl would be better than the den if only it existed. But where is it? Her eyes had never seen an idyl, but they had seen, ah, they had seen what happens and takes place with loves of men and women, 'and with bonds which bear the name of sacred! Well, what is to be done with the baron—and America? Such contempt for everything, such disbelief in all things, such a contemptuous despising of everything, and of her own self as well, embraced her and possessed her, that at the end of the meditation she said to herself: "It is all one!" She crossed her hands and pressed them firmly across her breast, bent her head somewhat, and thought: "It is all, all, all one!"
A few tears, one after another, fell on her tightly clasped fingers. "All one! If only the sooner!"
What sooner? Why sooner? With a slow movement she turned her face toward her mother's apartments; her lips which quivered, and the glistening tear which had fallen on them had the same kind of expression that a child has when crying in silence. With brows raised somewhat, she whispered:
"Mamma!"