Litvinov looked at Potugin, and it struck him that he had never yet met a man more lonely, more desolate ... more unhappy. This time he was not shy, he was not stiff; downcast and pale, his head on his breast, and his hands on his knees, he sat without moving, merely smiling his dejected smile. Litvinov felt sorry for the poor, embittered, eccentric creature.
‘Irina Pavlovna mentioned among other things,’ he began in a low voice, ‘a very intimate friend of hers, whose name if I remember was Byelsky, or Dolsky....’
Potugin raised his mournful eyes and looked at Litvinov.
‘Ah!’ he commented thickly.... ‘She mentioned ... well, what of it? It’s time, though,’ he added with a rather artificial yawn, ‘for me to be getting home—to dinner. Good-bye.’
He jumped up from the seat and made off quickly before Litvinov had time to utter a word.... His compassion gave way to annoyance—annoyance with himself, be it understood. Want of consideration of any kind was foreign to his nature; he had wished to express his sympathy for Potugin, and it had resulted in something like a clumsy insinuation. With secret dissatisfaction in his heart, he went back to his hotel.
‘Rotten to the marrow of her bones,’ he thought a little later ... ‘but proud as the devil! She, that woman who is almost on her knees to me, proud? proud and not capricious?’
Litvinov tried to drive Irina’s image out of his head, but he did not succeed. For this very reason he did not think of his betrothed; he felt to-day this haunting image would not give up its place. He made up his mind to await without further anxiety the solution of all this ‘strange business’; the solution could not be long in coming, and Litvinov had not the slightest doubt it would turn out to be most innocent and natural. So he fancied, but meanwhile he was not only haunted by Lina’s image—every word she had uttered kept recurring in its turn to his memory.
The waiter brought him a note: it was from the same Irina:
‘If you have nothing to do this evening, come to me; I shall not be alone; I shall have guests, and you will get a closer view of our set, our society. I want you very much to see something of them; I fancy they will show themselves in all their brilliance. You ought to know what sort of atmosphere I am breathing. Come; I shall be glad to see you, and you will not be bored. (Irina had spelt the Russian incorrectly here.) Prove to me that our explanation to-day has made any sort of misunderstanding between us impossible for ever.—Yours devotedly, I.
Litvinov put on a frock coat and a white tie, and set off to Irina’s. ‘All this is of no importance,’ he repeated mentally on the way, ‘as for looking at them ... why shouldn’t I have a look at them? It will be curious.’ A few days before, these very people had aroused a different sensation in him; they had aroused his indignation.