If I had followed my heart's first impulse, I should have fallen at her feet. I did not do that simply through lack of courage, and because I had lost my head. I had just presence of mind enough to repeat in any soul, "Do not roar out, thou ass!" The honest father came again to our rescue; freeing himself from Tola's embrace, he said, as if angry with her,—
"If thou dost not believe me, then go to him."
And he pushed her toward me. Heaven opened before me at that moment. I seized her hands. I kissed them with delight, and I know not myself how long it was before I could take my lips from them. More than once I had imagined myself kissing her hands, but it is not for imagination to measure itself with reality! My love, so far, had been like a plant shut up in darkness. Now it was carried suddenly into bright air to luxuriate in warmth and in sunlight, hence the measure of my happiness was filled. I drank openly from the source of good and delight. To love and imprison that love in thyself, to love and feel that thou art entering on thy right to love and take possession,—are things entirely different. I not only had not had, but I could not have had, any comprehension of this.
The parents blessed us, and went out on purpose to leave us alone, so that we might tell each other all that we felt. But at first, instead of speaking, I only looked at her with ravishment, and her face changed beneath my gaze. Blushes covered her cheeks; the corners of her mouth quivered with a smile full of timidity and embarrassment; her eyes were mist-covered; her head sank, as it were, between her shoulders; at moments she dropped her eyelids and seemed to wait for my words.
At last, we sat down side by side at the window, each holding the other's hand. Till that day she had been for me, not of flesh and blood, as it were, but an abstraction, a beloved spirit, a precious name, an admired charm rather than a person; when her arm touched mine, however, and I felt the warmth of her face, I could not resist a certain astonishment that she was so real. A beloved woman seems known but not felt till one is near her. Now I looked with as much wonder at her face, her mouth, her eyes, her bright hair, and her still brighter eyelashes, as if I had never seen her till that moment. I was carried away by her. Never had a face so satisfied all my dreams of woman's beauty; no one had ever attracted me so irresistibly as she. And when I thought that all those treasures would be mine, that they belonged to me already, and were my highest good, the whole world whirled around with me.
At last I spoke. I told her feverishly how I had loved her from almost the very first moment, a year and a half before, in Velichka, where I met her by chance in a large society, to me unknown, and where she had grown faint at the bottom of the salt mine; and I ran to the well for water. The next day I paid a visit to her parents; from that visit I came away in love completely.
All this, as I supposed, was perfectly known to her; but she listened with the greatest delight, blushing, and sometimes even asking questions in a low voice. I spoke a long time, and toward the end less stupidly than I had expected. I told how afterward she had been my only strength; how deeply and dreadfully unhappy I was yesterday when I said to myself that all was lost, and that I had lost faith in her also.
"I was just as unhappy," said she. "And it is true that at first I could not stammer out a word, but later I tried to correct everything."
After a while we were both silent. In me there was a struggle between timidity and a wish to kiss her feet; at last, in the most monstrously awkward way possible, and worthy of the last of idiots, I asked her if she loved me even a little.
She strove for a time to give me an answer, but, unable to bring herself to it, she rose and left the room.