“Passion!” he repeated to himself. If her burning fire could but be poured out upon him, and engulf the artist in her destroying waves.
As he moved forward he remembered that his stroll had an aim. He wondered how Leonid Koslov was, whether he had changed, or whether he had remained what he had been before, a child for all his learning. He too was a good subject for an artist. Raisky thought of Leonti’s beautiful wife, whose acquaintance he had made during his student days in Moscow, when she was a young girl. She used to call Leonti her fiancé, without any denial on his part, and five years after he had left the University he made the journey to Moscow, and married her. He loved his wife as a man loves air and warmth; absorbed in the life and art of the ancients, his lover’s eyes saw in her the antique ideal of beauty. The lines of her neck and bosom charmed him, and her head recalled to him Roman heads seen on bas-reliefs and cameos.
Leonti did not recognise Raisky, when his friend suddenly entered his study.
But when Boris Pavlovich opened his lips he embraced him.
“Wife! Ulinka!” he cried into the garden. “Come quickly, and see who has come to see us.”
“What a man you have grown, and how much more handsome you are!” she said, her eyes flashing.
Her eyes, her mien, her whole figure betrayed audacity. Just over thirty years old, she gave the impression of a splendidly developed specimen of blooming womanhood.
“How should he forget you?” broke in Leonti. “But Ulinka is right. You have altered, and are hardly recognisable with your beard. How delighted your Aunt must have been to see you.”
“Ah! his Aunt!” remarked Juliana Andreevna in a tone of displeasure. “I don’t like her.”
“Yes, she is a despot,” answered Raisky. “That comes from intercourse with serfs. Old customs!”
“According to Tatiana Markovna,” continued Juliana Andreevna, “everybody should stay on one spot, turn his head neither to right nor left, and never exchange a word with his neighbours. She is a past mistress in fault-finding; nevertheless she and Tiet Nikonich are inseparable, he spends his days and nights with her.”
Raisky laughed and said, “She is a saint nevertheless, whatever you may find to say about her.”