acefully the curls, around her head nodded to the rhythm, and how
naively she executed the jete assemble with her little feet!

In the fifth figure, when my partner had to leave me for the other
side and I, counting the beats, was getting ready to dance my solo, she
pursed her lips gravely and looked in another direction; but her fears
for me were groundless. Boldly I performed the chasse en avant and
chasse en arriere glissade, until, when it came to my turn to move
towards her and I, with a comic gesture, showed her the poor glove with
its crumpled fingers, she laughed heartily, and seemed to move her tiny
feet more enchantingly than ever over the parquetted floor.

How well I remember how we formed the circle, and how, without
withdrawing her hand from mine, she scratched her little nose with
her glove! All this I can see before me still. Still can I hear the
quadrille from "The Maids of the Danube" to which we danced that night.

The second quadrille, I danced with Sonetchka herself; yet when we went
to sit down together during the interval, I felt overcome with shyness
and as though I had nothing to say. At last, when my silence had lasted
so long that I began to be afraid that she would think me a stupid boy,
I decided at all hazards to counteract such a notion.

"Vous etes une habitante de Moscou?" I began, and, on receiving an
affirmative answer, continued. "Et moi, je n'ai encore jamais frequente
la capitale" (with a particular emphasis on the word "frequente"). Yet I
felt that, brilliant though this introduction might be as evidence of my
profound knowledge of the French language, I could not long keep up the
conversation in that manner. Our turn for dancing had not yet arrived,
and silence again ensued between us. I kept looking anxiously at her in
the hope both of discerning what impression I had produced and of her
coming to my aid.

"Where did you get that ridiculous glove of yours?" she asked me all of
a sudden, and the question afforded me immense satisfaction and relief.
I replied that the glove belonged to Karl Ivanitch, and then went on
to speak ironically of his appearance, and to describe how comical he
looked in his red cap, and how he and his green coat had once fallen
plump off a horse into a pond.

The quadrille was soon over. Yet why had I spoken ironically of poor
Karl Ivanitch? Should I, forsooth, have sunk in Sonetchka's esteem if,
on the contrary, I had spoken of him with the love and