“What?” she asked, smiling.

He was silent and looked at her, then, just as in the arbour, he took her hand, and she looked at him with a smile and waited for what would happen next.

“I love you,” he whispered.

She left off smiling, thought a minute, and said: 

“Wait a little; I think somebody is coming.  Oh, these schoolboys!” she said in an undertone, going to the door and peeping out into the passage.  “No, there is no one to be seen. . . .”

She came back.

Then it seemed to Volodya that the room, Nyuta, the sunrise and himself—­all melted together in one sensation of acute, extraordinary, incredible bliss, for which one might give up one’s whole life and face eternal torments. . . .  But half a minute passed and all that vanished.  Volodya saw only a fat, plain face, distorted by an expression of repulsion, and he himself suddenly felt a loathing for what had happened.

“I must go away, though,” said Nyuta, looking at Volodya with disgust.  “What a wretched, ugly . . . fie, ugly duckling!”

How unseemly her long hair, her loose wrap, her steps, her voice seemed to Volodya now! . . .

“‘Ugly duckling’ . . .” he thought after she had gone away.  “I really am ugly . . . everything is ugly.”

The sun was rising, the birds were singing loudly; he could hear the gardener walking in the garden and the creaking of his wheelbarrow . . . and soon afterwards he heard the lowing of the cows and the sounds of the shepherd’s pipe.  The sunlight and the sounds told him that somewhere in this world there is a pure, refined, poetical life.  But where was it?  Volodya had never heard a word of it from his maman or any of the people round about him.

When the footman came to wake him for the morning train, he pretended to be asleep. . . .

“Bother it!  Damn it all!” he thought.

He got up between ten and eleven.

Combing his hair before the looking-glass, and looking at his ugly face, pale from his sleepless night, he thought: 

“It’s perfectly true . . . an ugly duckling!”

When maman saw him and was horrified that he was not at his examination, Volodya said: 

“I overslept myself, maman. . . .  But don’t worry, I will get a medical certificate.”

Madame Shumihin and Nyuta waked up at one o’clock.  Volodya heard Madame Shumihin open her window with a bang, heard Nyuta go off into a peal of laughter in reply to her coarse voice.  He saw the door open and a string of nieces and other toadies (among the latter was his maman) file into lunch, caught a glimpse of Nyuta’s freshly washed laughing face, and, beside her, the black brows and beard of her husband the architect, who had just arrived.

Nyuta was wearing a Little Russian dress which did not suit her at all, and made her look clumsy; the architect was making dull and vulgar jokes.  The rissoles served at lunch had too much onion in them—­so it seemed to Volodya.  It also seemed to him that Nyuta laughed loudly on purpose, and kept glancing in his direction to give him to understand that the memory of the night did not trouble her in the least, and that she was not aware of the presence at table of the “ugly duckling.”