The next day towards evening the clouds gathered again, and Kukin said with an hysterical laugh: 

“Oh, I don’t care.  Let it do its worst.  Let it drown the whole theatre, and me, too.  All right, no luck for me in this world or the next.  Let the actors bring suit against me and drag me to court.  What’s the court?  Why not Siberia at hard labour, or even the scaffold?  Ha, ha, ha!”

It was the same on the third day.

Olenka listened to Kukin seriously, in silence.  Sometimes tears would rise to her eyes.  At last Kukin’s misfortune touched her.  She fell in love with him.  He was short, gaunt, with a yellow face, and curly hair combed back from his forehead, and a thin tenor voice.  His features puckered all up when he spoke.  Despair was ever inscribed on his face.  And yet he awakened in Olenka a sincere, deep feeling.

She was always loving somebody.  She couldn’t get on without loving somebody.  She had loved her sick father, who sat the whole time in his armchair in a darkened room, breathing heavily.  She had loved her aunt, who came from Brianska once or twice a year to visit them.  And before that, when a pupil at the progymnasium, she had loved her French teacher.  She was a quiet, kind-hearted, compassionate girl, with a soft gentle way about her.  And she made a very healthy, wholesome impression.  Looking at her full, rosy cheeks, at her soft white neck with the black mole, and at the good naive smile that always played on her face when something pleasant was said, the men would think, “Not so bad,” and would smile too; and the lady visitors, in the middle of the conversation, would suddenly grasp her hand and exclaim, “You darling!” in a burst of delight.

The house, hers by inheritance, in which she had lived from birth, was located at the outskirts of the city on the Gypsy Road, not far from the Tivoli.  From early evening till late at night she could hear the music in the theatre and the bursting of the rockets; and it seemed to her that Kukin was roaring and battling with his fate and taking his chief enemy, the indifferent public, by assault.  Her heart melted softly, she felt no desire to sleep, and when Kukin returned home towards morning, she tapped on her window-pane, and through the curtains he saw her face and one shoulder and the kind smile she gave him.

He proposed to her, and they were married.  And when he had a good look of her neck and her full vigorous shoulders, he clapped his hands and said: 

“You darling!”

He was happy.  But it rained on their wedding-day, and the expression of despair never left his face.

They got along well together.  She sat in the cashier’s box, kept the theatre in order, wrote down the expenses, and paid out the salaries.  Her rosy cheeks, her kind naive smile, like a halo around her face, could be seen at the cashier’s window, behind the scenes, and in the cafe.  She began to tell her friends that the theatre was the greatest, the most important, the most essential thing in the world, that it was the only place to obtain true enjoyment in and become humanised and educated.