‘Yes, I am going to be married,’ he said at last, and at once withdrew.
Ratmirov came back into the room.
‘Well, why aren’t you dressed?’ he asked.
‘You can go alone; my head aches.’
‘But the princess....’
Irina scanned her husband from head to foot in one look, turned her back upon him, and went away to her boudoir.
[XIII]
Litvinov felt much annoyed with himself, as though he had lost money at roulette, or failed to keep his word. An inward voice told him that he—on the eve of marriage, a man of sober sense, not a boy—ought not to have given way to the promptings of curiosity, nor the allurements of recollection. ‘Much need there was to go!’ he reflected. ‘On her side simply flirtation, whim, caprice.... She’s bored, she’s sick of everything, she clutched at me ... as some one pampered with dainties will suddenly long for black bread ... well, that’s natural enough.... But why did I go? Can I feel anything but contempt for her?’ This last phrase he could not utter even in thought without an effort.... ‘Of course, there’s no kind of danger, and never could be,’ he pursued his reflections. ‘I know whom I have to deal with. But still one ought not to play with fire.... I’ll never set my foot in her place again.’ Litvinov dared not, or could not as yet, confess to himself how beautiful Irina had seemed to him, how powerfully she had worked upon his feelings.
Again the day passed dully and drearily. At dinner, Litvinov chanced to sit beside a majestic belhomme, with dyed moustaches, who said nothing, and only panted and rolled his eyes ... but, being suddenly taken with a hiccup, proved himself to be a fellow-countryman, by at once exclaiming, with feeling, in Russian, ‘There, I said I ought not to eat melons!’ In the evening, too, nothing happened to compensate for a lost day; Bindasov, before Litvinov’s very eyes, won a sum four times what he had borrowed from him, but, far from repaying his debt, he positively glared in his face with a menacing air, as though he were prepared to borrow more from him just because he had been a witness of his winnings. The next morning he was again invaded by a host of his compatriots; Litvinov got rid of them with difficulty, and setting off to the mountains, he first came across Irina—he pretended not to recognise her, and passed quickly by—and then Potugin. He was about to begin a conversation with Potugin, but the latter did not respond to him readily. He was leading by the hand a smartly dressed little girl, with fluffy, almost white curls, large black eyes, and a pale, sickly little face, with that peculiar peremptory and impatient expression characteristic of spoiled children. Litvinov spent two hours in the mountains, and then went back homewards along the Lichtenthaler Allee.... A lady, sitting on a bench, with a blue veil over her face, got up quickly, and came up to him.... He recognised Irina.