‘Well, at least, take the book!’
‘Another time.’
Tarhov rushed towards the girl, but at that instant she darted out of the room. He almost knocked his nose against the door. ‘What a girl! She’s a regular little viper!’ he declared with some vexation, and then sank into thought.
I stayed at Tarhov’s. I wanted to find out what was the meaning of it all. Tarhov was not disposed to be reserved. He told me that the girl was a milliner; that he had seen her for the first time three weeks before in a fashionable shop, where he had gone on a commission for his sister, who lived in the provinces, to buy a hat; that he had fallen in love with her at first sight, and that next day he had succeeded in speaking to her in the street; that she had herself, it seemed, taken rather a fancy to him.
‘Only, please, don’t you suppose,’ he added with warmth,—‘don’t you imagine any harm of her. So far, at any rate, there’s been nothing of that sort between us.
‘Harm!’ I caught him up; ‘I’ve no doubt of that; and I’ve no doubt either that you sincerely deplore the fact, my dear fellow! Have patience—everything will come right’
‘I hope so,’ Tarhov muttered through his teeth, though with a laugh. ‘But really, my boy, that girl ... I tell you—it’s a new type, you know. You hadn’t time to get a good look at her. She’s a shy thing!—oo! such a shy thing! and what a will of her own! But that very shyness is what I like in her. It’s a sign of independence! I’m simply over head and ears, my boy!’
Tarhov fell to talking of his ‘charmer,’ and even read me the beginning of a poem entitled: ‘My Muse.’ His emotional outpourings were not quite to my taste. I felt secretly jealous of him. I soon left him.
A few days after I happened to be passing through one of the arcades of the Gostinny Dvor. It was Saturday; there were crowds of people shopping; on all sides, in the midst of the pushing and crushing, the shopmen kept shouting to people to buy. Having bought what I wanted, I was thinking of nothing but getting away from their teasing importunity as soon as possible—when all at once I halted involuntarily: in a fruit shop I caught sight of my comrade’s charmer—Musa, Musa Pavlovna! She was standing, profile to me, and seemed to be waiting for something. After a moment’s hesitation I made up my mind to go up to her and speak. But I had hardly passed through the doorway of the shop and taken off my cap, when she tottered back dismayed, turned quickly to an old man in a frieze cloak, for whom the shopman was weighing out a pound of raisins, and clutched at his arm, as though fleeing to put herself under his protection. The latter, in his turn, wheeled round facing her—and, imagine my amazement, I recognised him as Punin!