“Ach! one can’t force oneself to love,” he assured himself, and at the same time he thought, “But shall I ever fall in love without?  I am nearly thirty!  I have never met anyone better than Vera and I never shall. . . .  Oh, this premature old age!  Old age at thirty!”

Vera walked on in front more and more rapidly, without looking back at him or raising her head.  It seemed to him that sorrow had made her thinner and narrower in the shoulders.

“I can imagine what’s going on in her heart now!” he thought, looking at her back.  “She must be ready to die with shame and mortification!  My God, there’s so much life, poetry, and meaning in it that it would move a stone, and I . . .  I am stupid and absurd!”

At the gate Vera stole a glance at him, and, shrugging and wrapping her shawl round her walked rapidly away down the avenue.

Ivan Alexeyitch was left alone.  Going back to the copse, he walked slowly, continually standing still and looking round at the gate with an expression in his whole figure that suggested that he could not believe his own memory.  He looked for Vera’s footprints on the road, and could not believe that the girl who had so attracted him had just declared her love, and that he had so clumsily and bluntly “refused” her.  For the first time in his life it was his lot to learn by experience how little that a man does depends on his own will, and to suffer in his own person the feelings of a decent kindly man who has against his will caused his neighbour cruel, undeserved anguish.

His conscience tormented him, and when Vera disappeared he felt as though he had lost something very precious, something very near and dear which he could never find again.  He felt that with Vera a part of his youth had slipped away from him, and that the moments which he had passed through so fruitlessly would never be repeated.

When he reached the bridge he stopped and sank into thought.  He wanted to discover the reason of his strange coldness.  That it was due to something within him and not outside himself was clear to him.  He frankly acknowledged to himself that it was not the intellectual coldness of which clever people so often boast, not the coldness of a conceited fool, but simply impotence of soul, incapacity for being moved by beauty, premature old age brought on by education, his casual existence, struggling for a livelihood, his homeless life in lodgings.  From the bridge he walked slowly, as it were reluctantly, into the wood.  Here, where in the dense black darkness glaring patches of moonlight gleamed here and there, where he felt nothing except his thoughts, he longed passionately to regain what he had lost.