laugh:
"Well, rain away, then! Flood the garden, drown me! Damn my luck
in this world and the next! Let the artists have me up! Send me to
prison!--to Siberia!--the scaffold! Ha, ha, ha!"
And next day the same thing.
Olenka listened to Kukin with silent gravity, and sometimes tears
came into her eyes. In the end his misfortunes touched her; she
grew to love him. He was a small thin man, with a yellow face, and
curls combed forward on his forehead. He spoke in a thin tenor; as
he talked his mouth worked on one side, and there was always an
expression of despair on his face; yet he aroused a deep and genuine
affection in her. She was always fond of some one, and could not
exist without loving. In earlier days she had loved her papa, who
now sat in a darkened room, breathing with difficulty; she had loved
her aunt who used to come every other year from Bryansk; and before
that, when she was at school, she had loved her French master. She
was a gentle, soft-hearted, compassionate girl, with mild, tender
eyes and very good health. At the sight of her full rosy cheeks,
her soft white neck with a little dark mole on it, and the kind,
naive smile, which came into her face when she listened to anything
pleasant, men thought, "Yes, not half bad," and smiled too, while
lady visitors could not refrain from seizing her hand in the middle
of a conversation, exclaiming in a gush of delight, "You darling!"
The house in which she had lived from her birth upwards, and which
was left her in her father's will, was at the extreme end of the
town, not far from the Tivoli. In the evenings and at night she
could head the band playing, and the crackling and banging of
fireworks, and it seemed to her that it was Kukin struggling with
his destiny, storming the entrenchments of his chief foe, the
indifferent public; there was a sweet thrill at her heart, she had
no desire to sleep, and when he returned home at day-break, she
tapped softly at her bedroom window, and showing him only her face
and one shoulder through the curtain, she gave him a friendly
smile. . . .
He proposed to her, and they were married. And when he had a closer
view of her neck and her plump, fine shoulders, he threw up his
hands, and said:
"You darling!"
He was happy, but as it rained on the day and night of his wedding,
his face still retained an expression of despair.
They got on very well together. She used to sit in his office, to
look after things in
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