“And when do you expect her?”
“In December, it would seem.”
“God grant happily! The lady, however, is healthy, so there is no fear.”
“She has changed greatly, has she not?”
“She is different from what she was, but God grant the most beautiful to look so. What an expression! A pure Botticelli. I give my word! Do you remember that portrait of his in the Villa Borghese? Madonna col Bambino e angeli. There is one head of an angel, a little inclined, dressed in a lily, just like the lady, the very same expression. Yesterday that struck me so much that I was moved by it.”
Then he went behind the screen to put on his shirt, and from behind the screen he said,—
“You ask why I don’t marry. Do you know why? I remember sometimes that Bukatski said the same thing. I have a sharp tongue and strong biceps, but a soft heart; so stupid is it that if I had such a wife as you have, and she were in that condition, as God lives, I shouldn’t know whether to walk on my knees before her, or to beat the floor with my forehead, or to put her on a table, in a corner somewhere, and adore her with upraised hands.”
“Ai!” said Pan Stanislav, laughing, “that only seems so before marriage; but afterward habituation itself destroys excess of feeling.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m so stupid—”
“Do you know what? When my Marynia is free, she must find for thee just such a wife as she herself is.”