The Garnet Bracelet and other Stories / Гранатовый браслет и другие повести. Книга для чтения на английском языке

“Why, she’s like a little bird: she chirps the first thing that comes into her head, and who knows whether her chirping isn’t much better than talk about women’s emancipation, Nietzsche, or the decadents?”

“Please don’t be cross with me, Nina Grigoryevna,” he said under his breath. “I let my tongue run away with me and said a lot of foolish things.”

Nina made no reply, but sat looking away at the rising moon. In the darkness he found her hand hanging down and clasped it tenderly.

“Please, Nina Grigoryevna,” he whispered.

She suddenly turned to him and responded with a swift, nervous handshake.

“What a bad temper you have!” she exclaimed in a tone of forgiveness and reproach. “You always hurt me, knowing that I can’t be cross with you!”

Pushing away his hand, which trembled suddenly, and almost breaking away from him, she ran across the veranda and into the house.

Miller sang with passion and melancholy:

And through unknown visions I rove.

I know not if thee my love glories,

I only know well that I love.

“’I only know well that I love’!” Bobrov repeated in an excited whisper, drawing a deep breath and pressing his hand to his throbbing heart.

“Why, then, do I exhaust myself in fruitless dreams of an unknown, lofty happiness while there is a plain but deep happiness here beside me?” he thought, moved. “What else do I want of a woman, of a wife who is so tender, so fetching, so gentle, and attentive? We poor nervous wrecks can’t take the joys of life as they are, but must poison them with our insatiable desire to rake in every feeling and every intention, whether it’s ours or somebody else’s.

This still night, the proximity of the girl I love, her sweet, artless talk, a momentary flash of anger and then a sudden caress – Heavens! Isn’t this what makes life worth living?”

When he entered the drawing-room he looked cheerful, nearly triumphant. His eyes met Nina’s, and he read in her gaze a tender answer to his thoughts.

“She shall be my wife,” he said to himself, calmly happy.

They were talking about Kvashnin. Filling the room with the ring of her confident voice, Anna Afanasyevna said that she too was going to take her “little girls” to the station on the following day.

“Vasily Terentyevich may well wish to pay us a visit. Anyway, Liza Belokonskaya – she’s a niece of my cousin’s husband – wrote me about his trip a month ago.