In the room we went into, the furniture was a little better, and was arranged with more taste. Though, indeed, at the moment, I was scarcely capable of noticing anything; I moved as in a dream and felt all through my being a sort of intense blissfulness that verged on imbecility.
The young princess sat down, took out a skein of red wool and, motioning me to a seat opposite her, carefully untied the skein and laid it across my hands. All this she did in silence with a sort of droll deliberation and with the same bright sly smile on her slightly parted lips. She began to wind the wool on a bent card, and all at once she dazzled me with a glance so brilliant and rapid, that I could not help dropping my eyes. When her eyes, which were generally half closed, opened to their full extent, her face was completely transfigured; it was as though it were flooded with light.
“What did you think of me yesterday, M’sieu Voldemar?” she asked after a brief pause. “You thought ill of me, I expect?”
“I … princess … I thought nothing … how can I?…” I answered in confusion.
“Listen,” she rejoined. “You don’t know me yet. I’m a very strange person; I like always to be told the truth. You, I have just heard, are sixteen, and I am twenty-one: you see I’m a great deal older than you, and so you ought always to tell me the truth … and to do what I tell you,” she added. “Look at me: why don’t you look at me?”
I was still more abashed; however, I raised my eyes to her. She smiled, not her former smile, but a smile of approbation. “Look at me,” she said, dropping her voice caressingly: “I don’t dislike that … I like your face; I have a presentiment we shall be friends. But do you like me?” she added slyly.
“Princess …” I was beginning.
“In the first place, you must call me Zinaïda Alexandrovna, and in the second place it’s a bad habit for children”—(she corrected herself) “for young people—not to say straight out what they feel. That’s all very well for grown-up people. You like me, don’t you?”
Though I was greatly delighted that she talked so freely to me, still I was a little hurt. I wanted to show her that she had not a mere boy to deal with, and assuming as easy and serious an air as I could, I observed, “Certainly. I like you very much, Zinaïda Alexandrovna; I have no wish to conceal it.”
She shook her head very deliberately. “Have you a tutor?” she asked suddenly.