Alice was walking with two unattractive-looking students and an officer.  She was laughing, talking loudly, and obviously flirting.  Vorotov had never seen her like that.  She was evidently happy, contented, warm, sincere.  What for?  Why?  Perhaps because these men were her friends and belonged to her own circle.  And Vorotov felt there was a terrible gulf between himself and that circle.  He bowed to his teacher, but she gave him a chilly nod and walked quickly by; she evidently did not care for her friends to know that she had pupils, and that she had to give lessons to earn money.

After the meeting at the theatre Vorotov realised that he was in love. . . .  During the subsequent lessons he feasted his eyes on his elegant teacher, and without struggling with himself, gave full rein to his imaginations, pure and impure.  Mdlle.  Enquete’s face did not cease to be cold; precisely at eight o’clock every evening she said coldly, “Au revoir, monsieur,” and he felt she cared nothing about him, and never would care anything about him, and that his position was hopeless.

Sometimes in the middle of a lesson he would begin dreaming, hoping, making plans.  He inwardly composed declarations of love, remembered that Frenchwomen were frivolous and easily won, but it was enough for him to glance at the face of his teacher for his ideas to be extinguished as a candle is blown out when you bring it into the wind on the verandah.  Once, overcome, forgetting himself as though in delirium, he could not restrain himself, and barred her way as she was going from the study into the entry after the lesson, and, gasping for breath and stammering, began to declare his love: 

“You are dear to me!  I . . .  I love you!  Allow me to speak.”

And Alice turned pale—­probably from dismay, reflecting that after this declaration she could not come here again and get a rouble a lesson.  With a frightened look in her eyes she said in a loud whisper: 

“Ach, you mustn’t!  Don’t speak, I entreat you!  You mustn’t!”

And Vorotov did not sleep all night afterwards; he was tortured by shame; he blamed himself and thought intensely.  It seemed to him that he had insulted the girl by his declaration, that she would not come to him again.

He resolved to find out her address from the address bureau in the morning, and to write her a letter of apology.  But Alice came without a letter.  For the first minute she felt uncomfortable, then she opened a book and began briskly and rapidly translating as usual: 

“’Oh, young gentleman, don’t tear those flowers in my garden which I want to be giving to my ill daughter. . . .’”

She still comes to this day.  Four books have already been translated, but Vorotov knows no French but the word “Memoires,” and when he is asked about his literary researches, he waves his hand, and without answering, turns the conversation to the weather.

THE PRINCESS