“Pretty hand!” he said, kissing it again and again without any objection from her, but when he sought to kiss her cheek she drew back.
“You refuse again. Is your reserve never to end? Perhaps you keep your caresses for....”
“You know I do not like jests of that kind. You must break yourself of this tone, and of wolfish manners generally; that would be the first step towards unaffected manhood.”
“Tone and manners! You are a child still occupied with your ABC. Before you lie freedom, life, love, happiness, and you talk of tone and manners. Where is the human soul, the woman in you? What is natural and genuine in you?”
“More than ever, so that I really don’t know how to treat him.”
“How hideous! It would be best to tell him the truth about myself. If he knew all he would be reconciled and would go away, as he said he intended to do long ago.”
“He will hate you, read you a lecture, and perhaps tell your Aunt.”
“God forbid that she should hear the truth except from ourselves. Should I go away for a time?”
“Why? It could not be arranged for you to be away long, and if your absence was short he would be only the more agitated. When you were away what good did it do. There is only one way and that is to conceal the truth from him, to put him on a wrong track. Let him cherish his passion, read verses, and gape at the moon, since he is an incurable Romanticist. Later on he will sober down and travel once more.”
“He is not a Romanticist in the sense you mean,” sighed Vera. “You may fairly call him poet, artist. I at least begin to believe in him, in his delicacy and his truthfulness. I would hide nothing from him if he did not betray his passion for me. If he subdues that, I will be the first to tell him the whole truth.”
“We did not meet,” interrupted Mark, “to talk so much about him.”
“Well, what have you done since we last met?” she asked gaily. “Whom have you met? Have you been discoursing on the ‘new strength’ or the ‘dawn of the future,’ or ‘young hopes?’ Every day I live in anxious expectation.”
“No, no,” laughed Mark. “I have ceased to bother about the people here; it is not worth while to tackle them.”
“God grant it were so. You would have done well if you had acted up to what you say. But I cannot be happy about you. At the Sfogins, the youngest son, Volodya, who is fourteen, declared to his mother that he was not going any more to Mass. When he was whipped, and questioned, he pointed to his eldest brother, who had sneaked into the servants’ room and there preached to the maids the whole evening that it was stupid to observe the fasts of the Church, to go through the ceremony of marriage, that there was no God....”