Xenia Pavlovna blushed, and a hardly perceptible shade of pleasure flitted over her face, and made it sweet and strong and proud.
“What are you saying!” she replied, slightly screwing up her eyes and coquettishly fanning herself. “On the contrary, I think I am growing worse looking with each passing day!”
Then all the men began to protest in chorus, and the women silently fixed their coiffures with their fingers, while Iván Mikhailovich looked at his wife and thought that she was really a very lovely woman, probably one of the loveliest in the whole theatre, and he also began to feel very pleased, and twirling his mustaches, he spoke proudly:
“You ought to see her portrait when she was my fiancée! It hangs over my desk. She had a braid twice as thick as this Marguerite’s—”
In the last scene a whole revolution took place in the soul of Iván Mikhailovich. He began to imagine Xenia Pavlovna overtaken by the sad fate of Marguerite, and himself in the rôle of Faust, and grew very sorry for Xenia Pavlovna. The gloomy arches of the prison, on the gray stone floor some straw, and on it this woman, outraged, criminal, insane, and nevertheless so pure and saintly; the low melodies so full of sadness and tenderness in which arose hazy memories of past happiness, made Iván Mikhailovich’s breath come faster. He looked at Xenia Pavlovna, and noticing tears in her eyes, felt that this woman was very dear to him and that he was somehow very guilty toward her.
Iván Mikhailovich sadly gazed upon the stage, listened to the low strains of music, and it seemed to him at times that it was his Xenia thrown into prison, and he recalled how they first met at a ball and how he at the conclusion of it sang: “Amidst the noisy ball,” and how they afterward sat in the dark garden listening to the singing of the nightingale and gazing at the silvery stars.
All this was, but it had passed as if in a dream.
They returned from the theatre with souls refreshed, overfilled with sadness mingled with joy, and it seemed to both as if all their former disputes and frictions over trivialities had vanished forevermore, and a part of their former happiness had returned to them. They rode home dashingly in a light, new sleigh over the well-beaten road, and Iván Mikhailovich had his arm round Xenia Pavlovna’s waist as tightly as if he feared to lose her on the way. Xenia Pavlovna hid her face in the soft white fur of her collar, and only her sparkling eyes were visible from under a very becoming little hat of the same white fur, like two coals, dark and moist.
Iván Mikhailovich wished to kiss her, forgetting that they were in the open road, but Xenia Pavlovna screwed up her eyes, in which lurked silent laughter, and slightly shook her white fur hat.
At home the samovár and Maria Petrovna awaited them.