‘What, Grigory Mihalitch, you’ ... Irina too could not finish her sentence, and leaning back in her chair, she put both her hands to her eyes. ‘You ... love me.’
‘Yes ... yes ... yes,’ he repeated with bitterness, turning his head further and further away.
Everything was silent in the room; a butterfly that had flown in was fluttering its wings and struggling between the curtain and the window.
The first to speak was Litvinov.
‘That, Irina Pavlovna,’ he began, ‘that is the misfortune, which ... has befallen me, which I ought to have foreseen and avoided, if I had not now just as in the Moscow days been carried off my feet at once. It seems fate is pleased to force me once again through you to suffer tortures, which one would have thought should not be repeated again.... It was not without cause I struggled.... I tried to struggle; but of course there’s no escaping one’s fate. And I tell you all this to put an end at once to this ... this tragic farce,’ he added with a fresh outburst of shame and bitterness.
Litvinov was silent again; the butterfly was struggling and fluttering as before. Irina did not take her hands from her face.
‘And you are not mistaken?’ her whisper sounded from under those white, bloodless-looking hands.
‘I am not mistaken,’ answered Litvinov in a colourless voice. ‘I love you, as I have never loved any one but you. I am not going to reproach you; that would be too foolish; I’m not going to tell you that perhaps nothing of all this would have happened if you yourself had behaved differently with me.... Of course, I alone am to blame, my self-confidence has been my ruin; I am deservedly punished, and you could not have anticipated it. Of course you did not consider that it would have been far less dangerous for me if you had not been so keenly alive to your wrong ... your supposed wrong to me; and had not wished to make up for it ... but what’s done can’t be undone. I only wanted to make clear my position to you; it’s hard enough as it is.... But at least there will be, as you say, no misunderstanding, while the openness of my confession will soften, I hope, the feeling of offence which you cannot but feel.’
Litvinov spoke without raising his eyes, but even if he had glanced at Irina, he could not have seen what was passing in her face, as she still as before kept her hands over her eyes. But what was passing over her face meanwhile would probably have astounded him; both alarm and delight were apparent on it, and a kind of blissful helplessness and agitation; her eyes hardly glimmered under their overhanging lids, and her slow, broken breathing was chill upon her lips, that were parted as though with thirst....