surprised, but I
don't care. . . ."

Ognev shrugged his shoulders once more and prepared himself to
listen.

"You see . . ." Verotchka began, bowing her head and fingering a
ball on the fringe of her shawl. "You see . . . this is what I
wanted to tell you. . . . You'll think it strange . . . and silly,
but I . . . can't bear it any longer."

Vera's words died away in an indistinct mutter and were suddenly
cut short by tears. The girl hid her face in her handkerchief, bent
lower than ever, and wept bitterly. Ivan Alexeyitch cleared his
throat in confusion and looked about him hopelessly, at his wits'
end, not knowing what to say or do. Being unused to the sight of
tears, he felt his own eyes, too, beginning to smart.

"Well, what next!" he muttered helplessly. "Vera Gavrilovna, what's
this for, I should like to know? My dear girl, are you . . . are
you ill? Or has someone been nasty to you? Tell me, perhaps I could,
so to say . . . help you. . . ."

When, trying to console her, he ventured cautiously to remove her
hands from her face, she smiled at him through her tears and said:

"I . . . love you!"

These words, so simple and ordinary, were uttered in ordinary human
language, but Ognev, in acute embarrassment, turned away from Vera,
and got up, while his confusion was followed by terror.

The sad, warm, sentimental mood induced by leave-taking and the
home-made wine suddenly vanished, and gave place to an acute and
unpleasant feeling of awkwardness. He felt an inward revulsion; he
looked askance at Vera, and now that by declaring her love for him
she had cast off the aloofness which so adds to a woman's charm,
she seemed to him, as it were, shorter, plainer, more ordinary.

"What's the meaning of it?" he thought with horror. "But I . . .
do I love her or not? That's the question!"

And she breathed easily and freely now that the worst and most
difficult thing was said. She, too, got up, and looking Ivan
Alexeyitch straight in the face, began talking rapidly, warmly,
irrepressibly.

As a man suddenly panic-stricken cannot afterwards remember the
succession of sounds accompanying the catastrophe that overwhelmed
him, so Ognev cannot remember Vera's words and phrases. He can only
recall the meaning of what she said, and the sensation her words
evoked in him. He remembers her voice, which seemed stifled and
husky with emotion, and the extraordinary music and passion of her
intonation. Laughing, crying with