On the Eve | Page 9

at that instant, in the little path along which the friends
were walking.
'But what do I see? Even here, there is beauty--coming to meet us! A
humble artist's compliments to the enchanting Zoya!' Shubin cried at
once, with a theatrical flourish of his hat.
The young girl to whom this exclamation referred, stopped, threatening
him with her finger, and, waiting for the two friends to come up to her,
she said in a ringing voice:
'Why is it, gentlemen, you don't come in to dinner? It is on the table.'
'What do I hear?' said Shubin, throwing his arms up. 'Can it be that you,
bewitching Zoya, faced such heat to come and look for us? Dare I think
that is the meaning of your words? Tell me, can it be so? Or no, do not
utter that word; I shall die of regret on the spot'
'Oh, do leave off, Pavel Yakovlitch,' replied the young girl with some
annoyance. 'Why will you never talk to me seriously? I shall be angry,'
she added with a little coquettish grimace, and she pouted.
'You will not be angry with me, ideal Zoya Nikitishna; you would not
drive me to the dark depths of hopeless despair. And I can't talk to you

seriously, because I'm not a serious person.'
The young girl shrugged her shoulders, and turned to Bersenyev.
'There, he's always like that; he treats me like a child; and I am eighteen.
I am grown-up now.'
'O Lord!' groaned Shubin, rolling his eyes upwards; and Bersenyev
smiled quietly.
The girl stamped with her little foot.
'Pavel Yakovlitch, I shall be angry! Helene was coming with me,' she
went on, 'but she stopped in the garden. The heat frightened her, but I
am not afraid of the heat. Come along.'
She moved forward along the path, slightly swaying her slender figure
at each step, and with a pretty black-mittened little hand pushing her
long soft curls back from her face.
The friends walked after her (Shubin first pressed his hands, without
speaking, to his heart, and then flung them higher than his head), and in
a few instants they came out in front of one of the numerous country
villas with which Kuntsovo is surrounded. A small wooden house with
a gable, painted a pink colour, stood in the middle of the garden, and
seemed to be peeping out innocently from behind the green trees. Zoya
was the first to open the gate; she ran into the garden, crying: 'I have
brought the wanderers!' A young girl, with a pale and expressive face,
rose from a garden bench near the little path, and in the doorway of the
house appeared a lady in a lilac silk dress, holding an embroidered
cambric handkerchief over her head to screen it from the sun, and
smiling with a weary and listless air.

III
Anna Vassilyevna Stahov--her maiden name was Shubin--had been left,
at seven years old, an orphan and heiress of a pretty considerable
property. She had very rich and also very poor relations; the poor
relations were on her father's, the rich on her mother's side; the latter
including the senator Volgin and the Princes Tchikurasov. Prince
Ardalion Tchikurasov, who had been appointed her guardian, placed
her in the best Moscow boarding-school, and when she left school, took
her into his own home. He kept open house, and gave balls in the
winter. Anna Vassilyevna's future husband, Nikolai Artemyevitch
Stahov, captured her heart at one of these balls when she was arrayed in

a charming rose-coloured gown, with a wreath of tiny roses. She had
treasured that wreath all her life. Nikolai Artemyevitch Stahov was the
son of a retired captain, who had been wounded in 1812, and had
received a lucrative post in Petersburg. Nikolai Artemyevitch entered
the School of Cadets at sixteen, and left to go into the Guards. He was a
handsome, well-made fellow, and reckoned almost the most dashing
beau at evening parties of the middling sort, which were those he
frequented for the most part; he had not gained a footing in the best
society. From his youth he had been absorbed by two ideals: to get into
the Imperial adjutants, and to make a good marriage; the first ideal he
soon discarded, but he clung all the more closely to the second, and it
was with that object that he went every winter to Moscow. Nikolai
Artemyevitch spoke French fairly, and passed for being a philosopher,
because he was not a rake. Even while he was no more than an ensign,
he was given to discussing, persistently, such questions as whether it is
possible for a man to visit the whole of the globe in the course of his
whole lifetime, whether it is possible for a