‘You will not be angry with me, ideal Zoya Nikitishna; you would not drive me to the dark depths of hopeless despair. And I can’t talk to you seriously, because I’m not a serious person.’
The young girl shrugged her shoulders, and turned to Bersenyev.
‘There, he’s always like that; he treats me like a child; and I am eighteen. I am grown-up now.’
‘O Lord!’ groaned Shubin, rolling his eyes upwards; and Bersenyev smiled quietly.
The girl stamped with her little foot.
‘Pavel Yakovlitch, I shall be angry! Hélène was coming with me,’ she went on, ‘but she stopped in the garden. The heat frightened her, but I am not afraid of the heat. Come along.’
She moved forward along the path, slightly swaying her slender figure at each step, and with a pretty black-mittened little hand pushing her long soft curls back from her face.
The friends walked after her (Shubin first pressed his hands, without speaking, to his heart, and then flung them higher than his head), and in a few instants they came out in front of one of the numerous country villas with which Kuntsovo is surrounded. A small wooden house with a gable, painted a pink colour, stood in the middle of the garden, and seemed to be peeping out innocently from behind the green trees. Zoya was the first to open the gate; she ran into the garden, crying: ‘I have brought the wanderers!’ A young girl, with a pale and expressive face, rose from a garden bench near the little path, and in the doorway of the house appeared a lady in a lilac silk dress, holding an embroidered cambric handkerchief over her head to screen it from the sun, and smiling with a weary and listless air.