"Really, it's cruel," she cries out, and suddenly blushes all over. "You want me to tell you the truth outright. Very well if ... if you will have it I I've no talent! No talent and ... much ambition! There you are!"
After this confession, she turns her face away from me, and to hide the trembling of her hands, tugs at the reins.
As we approach her bungalow, from a distance we see Mikhail already, walking about by the gate, impatiently awaiting us.
"This Fiodorovich again," Katy says with annoyance. "Please take him away from me. I'm sick of him. He's flat.... Let him go to the deuce."
Mikhail Fiodorovich ought to have gone abroad long ago, but he has postponed his departure every week. There have been some changes in him lately. He's suddenly got thin, begun to be affected by drink--a thing that never happened to him before, and his black eyebrows have begun to get grey. When our buggy stops at the gate he cannot hide his joy and impatience. Anxiously he helps Katy and me from the buggy, hastily asks us questions, laughs, slowly rubs his hands, and that gentle, prayerful, pure something that I used to notice only in his eyes is now poured over all his face. He is happy and at the same time ashamed of his happiness, ashamed of his habit of coming to Katy's every evening, and he finds it necessary to give a reason for his coming, some obvious absurdity, like: "I was passing on business, and I thought I'd just drop in for a second."
All three of us go indoors. First we drink tea, then our old friends, the two packs of cards, appear on the table, with a big piece of cheese, some fruit, and a bottle of Crimean champagne. The subjects of conversation are not new, but all exactly the same as they were in the winter. The university, the students, literature, the theatre--all of them come in for it. The air thickens with slanders, and grows more dose. It is poisoned by the breath, not of two toads as in winter, but now by all three. Besides the velvety, baritone laughter and the accordion-like giggle, the maid who waits upon us hears also the unpleasant jarring laugh of a musical comedy general: "He, he, he!"
There sometimes come fearful nights with thunder, lightning, rain, and wind, which the peasants call "sparrow-nights." There was one such sparrow-night in my own personal life....