s to speak of the future, and the confidence and
self-reliance with which one does so is beyond bounds. You make
plans and projects, talk fervently of the rank of general though
you have not yet reached the rank of a lieutenant, and altogether
you fire off such high-flown nonsense that your listener must have
a great deal of love and ignorance of life to assent to it. Fortunately
for men, women in love are always blinded by their feelings and
never know anything of life. Far from not assenting, they actually
turn pale with holy awe, are full of reverence and hang greedily
on the maniac's words. Sasha listened to me with attention, but I
soon detected an absent-minded expression on her face, she did not
understand me. The future of which I talked interested her only in
its external aspect and I was wasting time in displaying my plans
and projects before her. She was keenly interested in knowing which
would be her room, what paper she would have in the room, why I had
an upright piano instead of a grand piano, and so on. She examined
carefully all the little things on my table, looked at the photographs,
sniffed at the bottles, peeled the old stamps off the envelopes,
saying she wanted them for something.

"Please collect old stamps for me!" she said, making a grave face.
"Please do."

Then she found a nut in the window, noisily cracked it and ate it.

"Why don't you stick little labels on the backs of your books?" she
asked, taking a look at the bookcase.

"What for?"

"Oh, so that each book should have its number. And where am I to
put my books? I've got books too, you know."

"What books have you got?" I asked.

Sasha raised her eyebrows, thought a moment and said:

"All sorts."

And if it had entered my head to ask her what thoughts, what
convictions, what aims she had, she would no doubt have raised her
eyebrows, thought a minute, and have said in the same way: "All
sorts."

Later I saw Sasha home and left her house regularly, officially
engaged, and was so reckoned till our wedding. If the reader will
allow me to judge merely from my personal experience, I maintain
that to be engaged is very dreary, far more so than to be a husband
or nothing at all. An engaged man is neither one thing nor the
other, he has left one side of the river and not reached the other,
he is not married and yet he can't be said to be a bachelor, but
is in something not unlike the condition of the porter whom I have
mentioned a