Marynia began to explain; but he turned to Zavilovski, and said,—
“I enter into nothing in this case, and know only this,—that I have not the least faith in those ladies.”
Zavilovski went home full of dreams. All the strings of his imagination had been stirred and sounded, so that the wished-for sleep fled from him. He did not light a lamp, so that nothing might prevent him from playing on those quivering strings; he sat in the moonlight and mused, or rather, created. He was not in love yet; but a great tenderness had possessed him at thought of Lineta, and he arranged images as if he loved already. He saw her as distinctly as though she were before him; he saw her dreamy eyes, and her golden head, bending, like a cut flower, till it reached his breast. And now it seems to him that he is placing his fingers on her temples, and that he is feeling the satin touch of her hair, and, bending her head back a little, he looks to see if the fondling has not dried her tears; and her eyes laugh at him, like the sky still wet from rain, but sunny. Imagination moves his senses. He thinks that he is confessing his love to her; that he presses her to his bosom, and feels her heart beating; that he kneels with his head on her knees, from which comes warmth through the silk garment to his face. And he began in reality to shiver. Hitherto she had been for him an image; now he feels her for the first time as a woman. There is not in him even one thought which is not on her; and he so forgets himself in her that he loses consciousness of where he is, and what is happening within him.
Some kind of hoarse singing on the street roused him; then he lighted a lamp, and began to think more soberly. A kind of alarm seized him now, because one thing seemed undoubted,—if he did not cease to visit Pani Bronich and the Osnovskis altogether, he would fall in love with that maiden past memory.
“I must choose, then,” said he to himself.
And next day he went to see her, for he had begun to yearn; and that same night he tried to write a poem with the title of “Spider-web.”
He dared not go to Pani Bronich herself, so he waited till the hour when he could find all at tea, in the common drawing-room. Pani Aneta received him with uncommon cordiality, and outbursts of joyous laughter; but he, after greeting her, began to look at Lineta’s face, and his heart beat with more force when he saw in her a great and deep joy.
“Do you know what?” cried Pani Aneta, with her usual vivacity. “Our ‘Poplar’ likes beards so much that I thought this of you: ‘he is letting his beard grow, and does not show himself.’”
“No, no!” said the “Poplar,” “stay as you were when I made your acquaintance.”
But Pan Osnovski put his arm around Zavilovski, and said, in that pleasant tone of a man of good breeding, who knows how to bring people at once to more intimate and cordial relations,—