“Ach, it must be very interesting! Tell me, please!” the woman asked with an ingratiating smile.
And once more something unnatural and false sounded in this voice, which tried to be soft and round like the voice of his mother, but remained sharp and prickly. The same insincerity appeared also in all the movements of the woman; she turned on her chair and even stretched out her neck with a manner as if preparing for a long and attentive listening; and when Valia reluctantly began the story, she immediately retired within herself, like a dark-lantern on which the cover is suddenly thrown. Valia felt the offense toward himself and Prince Bova, but, wishing to be polite, he quickly finished the story and added: “That is all.”
“Well, good-by, my dear, my dove!” said the strange woman, and once more pressed her lips to Valia’s face. “I shall soon call again. Will you be glad?”
“Yes, come please,” politely replied Valia, and to get rid of her more quickly he added: “I will be very glad.”
The visitor left him, but hardly had Valia found in the book again the word at which he had been interrupted, when mama entered, looked at him, and she also began to weep. He could easily understand why the other woman should have wept; she must have been sorry that she was so unpleasant and tiresome—but why should his mama weep?
“Listen, mama,” he said musingly, “how that woman bored me! She says that she is my mama. Why, could there be two mamas to one boy?”
“No, baby, there could not; but she speaks the truth; she is your mother.”
“And what are you, then?”
“I am your auntie.”
This was a very unexpected discovery, but Valia received it with unshakable indifference; auntie, well, let it be auntie—was it not just the same? A word did not, as yet, have the same meaning for him as it would for a grown person. But his former mother did not understand it, and began to explain why it had so happened that she had been a mother and had become an aunt. Once, very long ago, when Valia was very, very little—