tears glistening on her eyelashes,
she told him that from the first day of their acquaintance he had
struck her by his originality, his intelligence, his kind intelligent
eyes, by his work and objects in life; that she loved him passionately,
deeply, madly; that when coming into the house from the garden in
the summer she saw his cape in the hall or heard his voice in the
distance, she felt a cold shudder at her heart, a foreboding of
happiness; even his slightest jokes had made her laugh; in every
figure in his note-books she saw something extraordinarily wise and
grand; his knotted stick seemed to her more beautiful than the
trees.

The copse and the wisps of mist and the black ditches at the side
of the road seemed hushed listening to her, whilst something strange
and unpleasant was passing in Ognev's heart. . . . Telling him of
her love, Vera was enchantingly beautiful; she spoke eloquently and
passionately, but he felt neither pleasure nor gladness, as he would
have liked to; he felt nothing but compassion for Vera, pity and
regret that a good girl should be distressed on his account. Whether
he was affected by generalizations from reading or by the insuperable
habit of looking at things objectively, which so often hinders
people from living, but Vera's ecstasies and suffering struck him
as affected, not to be taken seriously, and at the same time
rebellious feeling whispered to him that all he was hearing and
seeing now, from the point of view of nature and personal happiness,
was more important than any statistics and books and truths. . . .
And he raged and blamed himself, though he did not understand exactly
where he was in fault.

To complete his embarrassment, he was absolutely at a loss what to
say, and yet something he must say. To say bluntly, "I don't love
you," was beyond him, and he could not bring himself to say "Yes,"
because however much he rummaged in his heart he could not find one
spark of feeling in it. . . .

He was silent, and she meanwhile was saying that for her there was
no greater happiness than to see him, to follow him wherever he
liked this very moment, to be his wife and helper, and that if he
went away from her she would die of misery.

"I cannot stay here!" she said, wringing her hands. "I am sick of
the house and this wood and the air. I cannot bear the everlasting
peace and aimless life, I can't endure our colourless, pale people,
who are all as like one another as two drops