There is nothing remarkable in the love and depression of a nervous person. Who would remain, even for an instant, with a man who suffers in silence? And I kept silence from St. Mary's day to St. Peter's.
At last the momentous day arrived! Irinel finished the last year of her education. On the 20th of June she left school for good.
That very day she asked my uncle abruptly to what watering-place we were going, and on hearing came into my room.
Stretched upon my bed, I was reading the wonderful discourse of Cogalniceanu's, printed in front of the "Chronicles." I made up my mind to read law and study literature and history.
When I saw her I jumped up. She whirled round on one foot, and her gown seemed like a big convolvulus; and after this revolution she stopped in front of me, laughing and clapping her hands. She made me a curtsy as she daintily lifted up her skirt on either side between two fingers, and asked me coyly:
"Mon cher cousin, can you guess where we are going to this summer?"
"No, Irinel," I replied, exaggerating the cough which was becoming more and more of a silly habit.
And after once more whirling round while her gown swept across my feet, and laughing and clapping, she asked me most sedately:
"Will you kiss my hand with respect, like a grown-up person's, if I tell you?"
She held out her hand to me, which I kissed sadly, but with pleasure.
"To Mehadia! To Mehadia! Won't it be beautiful? I am bored with Slanic."
She ran about the house so quickly that her petticoats worked up above her knees. I blushed; she blushed; then breaking into a silvery laugh she threw herself upon me and said:
"We will dance a polka. I will sing. I will be gentleman; I will steer you."
Then I heard my uncle calling her: "Irinel! Irinel! Where are you?"
I threw myself on my bed. I took up the "Chronicles," but instead of reading I began to think. "Irinel! Irinel!" The first Irinel was quick, severe, malicious, the second one was lingering, much softer, almost caressing. Of course he had meant to reassure her, he had wanted to deceive me. He thought to make me believe he had meant nothing. But what did that "Where are you?" signify?
I understood from the way in which he had said "where" that there lay the real drift of the question. He had not anything to say to her, but he very much wanted to know "where" she was. In other words, was she perchance with me in my room? Such espionage was humiliating for an orphan whose whole life he had directed, and whose fortune he had controlled, because he had the right to say to him with a single word, by a single look: "This is how I reward an ungrateful person, a youth who has no regard for the old men who are soon to pass away, burying with them the moral customs of this country." That "Where are you?" was as clear as noonday. Do you suppose he did not know where she was?