Elisaveta and Elena were walking again on a path close to the road that connected the Prosianiya Meadows and the Rameyev estate. The sisters were glad that it was so still and deserted around them and that the turmoil of life seemed so remote from them. Life with all its bustling movement seemed indeed distant, and it was a joy to dismiss all its conditions and proprieties from their minds and to walk with bare feet upon the soft ground, the sand, the clay, and the grass; it filled their hearts with a simple, childlike, and chaste delight.
Both were dressed alike, in short frocks; there was a sash raised rather high at the waist, two other bands crossed each other at the breast, the sleeves were cut quite short at the shoulders.
They walked on farther, and their eyes contemplated gaily and affectionately the half-hidden depths of the valleys, the woods, and the thickets. A simple-hearted devotion to this lovable nature possessed them—it was a sweet and tender devotion. It struck a deep note in Elisaveta, who was in a mood of expectancy. If only she could have met some one deserving of her love whom she might place at the crossings of all earthly and heavenly roads, and to whom she might do obeisance!
This tender devotion aroused young virginal intoxication in Elena also. She felt herself in love—not with any one in particular, but with everything: as the air loves in the springtime, kissing all in its gladness; as a stream’s currents love when they brush caressingly past boys’ and girls’ pink knees—such were the currents of the stream that suddenly became visible, winding its way among the green in the direction of the River Skorodyen, into which it emptied itself.
The bridge was some way off, and so the sisters waded the stream. There was the delicious coolness of the water round their knees. They remained standing on the bank and admired the porcupines of sand, studded sparsely with tall blades of grass as with spines; also the round pebbles made smooth by the water. Their cooled legs felt for some time afterwards the sensation of the water’s loving caresses.
Just as the running water falls in love with all beauty that is immersed in it, so Elena fell in love with all that her vision evoked for her.
Most of all her love was directed towards Piotr. His love for Elisaveta wounded her with a sweet pain.
The sisters descended into the hollow near Trirodov’s colony, ascended it again to the other side, walked along the already familiar path, and opened the gate—this time it yielded without effort. They entered. Soon they saw a lake before them. The children and their instructresses were bathing. There was a spirit of buoyancy in the brown nakedness disporting itself in the buoyant waters—buoyant were the splashes, the laughter, and the outcries!
The children and the instructresses walked out of the water upon the dry ground and ran naked upon the sand. Their legs, bare and sunburnt, seemed white in the green grass, like young birch-saplings growing out of the earth.
They suddenly caught sight of the sisters, formed a ring of beautiful wet bodies around them, and twirled in a circle at a fast, furious pace. The discarded clothes that lay there close by seemed unnecessary to the sisters at that moment. What, after all, was more beautiful and lovely than the nude, eternal body?