Zinaída burst into a nervous laugh.
“You’re too late by one mail, my dear doctor. You observe badly; you are falling behind.—Put on your spectacles.—I am in no mood for caprices now; how jolly to play pranks on you or on myself!—and as for independence.... M’sieu Voldemar,”—added Zinaída, suddenly stamping her foot,—“don’t wear a melancholy face. I cannot endure to have people commiserating me.”—She hastily withdrew.
“This atmosphere is injurious, injurious to you, young man,”—said Lúshin to me once more.
XI
On the evening of that same day the customary visitors assembled at the Zasyékins’; I was among the number.
The conversation turned on Maidánoff’s poem; Zinaída candidly praised it.—“But do you know what?”—she said:—“If I were a poet, I would select other subjects. Perhaps this is all nonsense, but strange thoughts sometimes come into my head, especially when I am wakeful toward morning, when the sky is beginning to turn pink and grey.—I would, for example.... You will not laugh at me?”
“No! No!”—we all exclaimed with one voice.
“I would depict,”—she went on, crossing her arms on her breast, and turning her eyes aside,—“a whole company of young girls, by night, in a big boat, on a tranquil river. The moon is shining, and they are all in white and wear garlands of white flowers, and they are singing, you know, something in the nature of a hymn.”
“I understand, I understand, go on,”—said Maidánoff significantly and dreamily.
“Suddenly there is a noise—laughter, torches, tambourines on the shore.... It is a throng of bacchantes running with songs and outcries. It is your business to draw the picture, Mr. Poet ... only I would like to have the torches red and very smoky, and that the eyes of the bacchantes should gleam beneath their wreaths, and that the wreaths should be dark. Don’t forget also tiger-skins and cups—and gold, a great deal of gold.”