"Need you really go?" she asked. "Why not stay a little longer? Pray stay, for I find talking to you a stimulant—it is like walking on the edge of a precipice: at first one is afraid, then one gathers courage. Do not go."
"I thank you for the proposal, as also for your flattering estimate of my conversational powers," said Bazarov. "Nevertheless, I have tarried overlong in a sphere which is alien to my personality. Only for a while can flying fish support themselves in the air. Then they relapse into their natural element. Allow me to flop back into mine."
Yet a bitter laugh was twisting his pale features. She saw it, and felt sorry for him.
"The man still loves me," was her thought, and she extended a sympathetic hand.
He understood her, however.
"No, no!" he exclaimed as he withdrew a step or two. "Though poor, I have never yet accepted aims. Good-bye, and may your lot always be happy."
"Yet we shall meet again," she replied with an involuntary gesture. "Of that I am certain."
"Anything may occur in this world," he remarked—then bowed and was gone.
That afternoon he said to Arkady as he knelt down to pack his trunk:
"I hear that you are going to make a nest for yourself? And why should you not? It is an excellent course to take. But for you to dissemble is useless, and I had scarcely expected that you would do so. Has the preoccupation of it all deprived you of your tongue?"