“Meanwhile, the time is precious. We are parting for ever, if stupidity commands, if your Grandmother’s antiquated convictions separate us. I leave here a week from now. As you know the document assuring my freedom has arrived. Let us be together, and not be separated again.”
“Never!” he repeated angrily, with a gesture of impatience. “What lying words those are, ‘never’ and ‘always.’ Of course ‘never.’ Does not a year, perhaps two, three years, mean never? You want a never ending tenderness. Does such a thing exist?”
“Enough, Mark! I have heard enough of this temporary affection. Ah! I am very unhappy. The separation from you is not the only cloud over my soul. For a year now I have been hiding myself from my Grandmother, which oppresses me, and her still more. I hoped that in these days my trouble would end; we should put our thoughts, our hopes, our intentions on a clear footing. Then I would go to Grandmother and say: ‘This is what I have chosen for my whole life.’ But it is not to be, and we are to part?” she asked sadly.
“If I conceived myself to be an angel,” said Mark, “I might say ‘for our whole lives,’ and you would be justified. That gray-headed dreamer, Raisky, also thinks that women are created for a higher purpose.”
“They are created above all for the family. They are not angels, neither are they, most certainly, mere animals. I am no wolf’s mate, Mark, but a woman.”
“For the family, yes. But is that any hindrance for us. You want draperies, for fine feeling, sympathies and the rest of the stuff are nothing but draperies, like those famous leaves with which, it is said, human beings covered themselves in Paradise.”
Mark smiled sarcastically, and shrugged his shoulders.
“They may be draperies,” continued Vera, “but they also, according to your own teaching, are given by nature. What, I ask, is it that attaches you to me? You say you love me. You have altered, grown thinner. Is it not, by your conception of love, a matter of indifference whether you choose a companion in me, or from the poor quarter of our town, or from a village on the Volga. What has induced you to come down here for a whole year?”
“Examine your own fallacy, Vera,” he said, looking at her gloomily. “Love is not a concept merely, but a driving force, a necessity, and therefore is mostly blind. But I am not blindly chained to you. Your extraordinary beauty, your intellect and your free outlook hold me longer in thrall than would be possible with any other woman.”