ed by
mathematical figures! My heart is breaking. You, worthy gentlemen, see
a man laughing, and that means to your notions he's all right; you can
prove to him that he's humbugging himself, that's to say, he is not
suffering.... God bless you!'

Shubin abruptly left the window. 'Annu-shka!' Bersenyev felt an impulse
to shout after him, but he restrained himself; Shubin had really been
white with emotion. Two minutes later, Bersenyev even caught the sound
of sobbing; he got up and opened the window; everything was still, only
somewhere in the distance some one--a passing peasant, probably--was
humming 'The Plain of Mozdok.'

XIII

During the first fortnight of Insarov's stay in the Kuntsovo
neighbourhood, he did not visit the Stahovs more than four or five
times; Bersenyev went to see them every day. Elena was always pleased to
see him, lively and interesting talk always sprang up between them,
and yet he often went home with a gloomy face. Shubin scarcely showed
himself; he was working with feverish energy at his art; he either
stayed locked up in his room, from which he would emerge in a blouse,
smeared all over with clay, or else he spent days in Moscow where he
had a studio, to which models and Italian sculptors, his friends and
teachers, used to come to see him. Elena did not once succeed in talking
with Insarov, as she would have liked to do; in his absence she prepared
questions to ask him about many things, but when he came she felt
ashamed of her plans. Insarov's very tranquillity embarrassed her; it
seemed to her that she had not the right to force him to speak out; and
she resolved to wait; for all that, she felt that at every visit however
trivial might be the words that passed between them, he attracted her
more and more; but she never happened to be left alone with him--and
to grow intimate with any one, one must have at least one conversation
alone with him. She talked a great deal about him to Bersenyev.
Bersenyev realised that Elena's imagination had been struck by Insarov,
and was glad that his friend had not 'missed fire' as Shubin had
asserted. He told her cordially all he knew of him down to the minutest
details (we often, when we want to please some one, bring our friends
into our conversation, hardly ever suspecting that we are praising
ourselves in that way), and only at times, when Elena's pale cheeks
flushed a little and her eyes grew bright and wide, he felt a pang in
his heart of