The next day I woke up about ten o’clock. My uncle asked me in his kind, calm voice:
“Iorgu, are you not well that you got up so late to-day?”
I, feeling myself in fault, replied, embarrassed:
“No—a book—I went to sleep late.”
My ears were burning as though I had held them against a hot stove.
The veranda seemed to be giving way under me. Do you know, at that moment a thought crossed my mind that overwhelmed me? Irinel was only Irinel, but, with my uncle, what courage I should need! How would he, an old man of pious habits, regard in his old age a marriage within the prohibited degree among members of his own family?
Why did he stand in front of me? Why did he look at me like that? He understood me and was appraising me! His look spoke, though his lips most certainly did not move. I heard the words passing through his mind as distinctly as though some one had whispered in my ear:
“I never could have believed, nephew, that you would have turned my child’s head! What would your mother say were she alive to see this?”
Why did not my uncle turn away from me? Was he looking at me or elsewhere? What else was there to see? I do not know if the fault was great, but the judge was cruel. And my judge grew bigger, like a Titan, like a wall between me and Irinel. In my ears there rang what I am convinced was the sentence he had secretly passed on me: “What a depraved youth! The old are passing away, and with them disappear the old moral ideas!”
I was ready to sink under my chair. My uncle said to me: