re since she was born ... but
Aratoff thought:

"I do believe my aunt is right.... It is all because I am not used to
such things...." (He really had attracted the attention of the female
sex to himself for the first time ... at any rate, he had never noticed
it before.) "I must not indulge myself."

So he set to work at his books, and drank some linden-flower tea when he
went to bed, and even slept well all that night, and had no dreams. On
the following morning he busied himself with his photography, as though
nothing had happened....

But toward evening his spiritual serenity was again disturbed.

VI

To wit: a messenger brought him a note, written in a large, irregular
feminine hand, which ran as follows:

"If you guess who is writing to you, and if it does not bore you, come
to-morrow, after dinner, to the Tver boulevard--about five o'clock--and
wait. You will not be detained long. But it is very important. Come."

There was no signature. Aratoff instantly divined who his correspondent
was, and that was precisely what disturbed him.--"What nonsense!" he
said, almost aloud. "This is too much! Of course I shall not
go."--Nevertheless, he ordered the messenger to be summoned, and from
him he learned merely that the letter had been handed to him on the
street by a maid. Having dismissed him, Aratoff reread the letter, and
flung it on the floor.... But after a while he picked it up and read it
over again; a second time he cried: "Nonsense!" He did not throw the
letter on the floor this time, however, but put it away in a drawer.

Aratoff went about his customary avocations, busying himself now with
one, now with another; but his work did not make progress, was not a
success. Suddenly he noticed that he was waiting for Kupfer, that he
wanted to interrogate him, or even communicate something to him.... But
Kupfer did not make his appearance. Then Aratoff got Pushkin and read
Tatyana's letter and again felt convinced that that "gipsy" had not in
the least grasped the meaning of the letter. But there was that jester
Kupfer shouting: "A Rachel! A Viardot!" Then he went to his piano,
raised the cover in an abstracted sort of way, tried to search out in
his memory the melody of Tchaikovsky's romance; but he immediately
banged to the piano-lid with vexation and went to his aunt, in her own
room, which was always kept very hot, and was forever redolent of mint,
sage, and other medicinal herbs, and crowded with s