"Very much so," Ivan Fyodorovich confirmed seriously.
"Well, so ... it will be better if you all stay here and I go alone first, and you follow me right away, that same second; that will be better."
She had already reached the door, but suddenly she came back.
"I'll burst out laughing! I'll die of laughter!" she announced ruefully.
But that same second she turned and ran to the prince.
"Well, what is it? What do you think?" Ivan Fyodorovich said hastily.
"I'm afraid even to say," Lizaveta Prokofyevna replied, also hastily, "but I think it's clear."
"I, too, think it's clear. Clear as day. She loves him."
"Not just loves him, she's in love with him!" Alexandra Ivanovna echoed. "Only I wonder what for?"
"God bless her, if such is her fate!" Lizaveta Prokofyevna piously crossed herself.
"It means it's fate," the general confirmed, "there's no escaping fate!"
And they all went to the drawing room, but there another surprise awaited them.
Aglaya not only did not burst out laughing, as she feared, when she walked up to the prince, but she said to him even almost timidly:
"Forgive a foolish, bad, spoiled girl" (she took his hand), "and be assured that we all have boundless respect for you. And if I dared to make a mockery of your beautiful . . . kind simple-heartedness, then forgive me as you would a child for a prank; forgive me that I insisted on an absurdity which, of course, cannot have the least consequences . . ."
Aglaya uttered these last words with special emphasis.
Father, mother, and sisters all arrived in the drawing room in time to see and hear everything, and they were all struck by the "absurdity which, of course, cannot have the least consequences,"
and still more by the serious air with which Aglaya spoke of this absurdity. They all exchanged questioning glances; but the prince, it seemed, did not understand these words and was in the highest degree of happiness.
"Why do you speak like that," he murmured, "why do you . . . ask . . . forgiveness . . ."
He was even going to say that he was unworthy of having anyone ask his forgiveness. Who knows, perhaps he did notice the meaning of the words about the "absurdity which cannot have the least consequences," but, as a strange man, he may even have been glad of those words. Unquestionably, for him the height of bliss was the fact alone that he could again visit Aglaya without hindrance, that he would be allowed to talk with her, sit with her, walk with her, and, who knows, perhaps that alone would have contented him for the rest of his life! (It was this contentment, it seems, that Lizaveta Prokofyevna was secretly afraid of; she had divined it; she secretly feared many things that she did not even know how to express.)
It is hard to describe how animated and encouraged the prince became that evening. He was so merry that one became merry just looking at him—so Aglaya's sisters put it afterwards. He talked a great deal, and that had not happened to him since the very morning, six months earlier, when he had first made the acquaintance of the Epanchins; on his return to Petersburg, he had been noticeably and intentionally silent, and very recently, in front of everyone, had let slip to Prince Shch. that he had to restrain himself and keep silent, because he had no right to humiliate a thought by stating it. He was almost the only one who spoke all that evening, telling many stories; he answered questions clearly, gladly, and in detail. However, nothing resembling polite conversation showed in his words. The thoughts were all quite serious, sometimes even quite abstruse. The prince even stated some of his own views, his own private observations, so that it would all even have been ridiculous, if it had not been so "well stated," as all the listeners agreed afterwards. Though the general loved serious topics of conversation, both he and Lizaveta Prokofyevna personally found that there was too much learning, so that by the end of the evening they even began to feel sad. However, in the end the prince went so far as to tell several very funny anecdotes, at which he was the first to laugh, so that the others laughed more at his joyful laughter than at the anecdotes themselves. As for Aglaya,
she hardly even spoke all evening; instead, she listened to Lev Nikolaevich, without tearing herself away, and even did not so much listen to him as look at him.
"She just looks at him, can't take her eyes away; hangs on his every little word; snatches at it, snatches at it!" Lizaveta Prokofyevna said later to her husband. "But tell her she loves him, and God save us all!"
"No help for it—it's fate!" the general shrugged his shoulders and for a long time went on repeating this little phrase that had caught his fancy. We shall add that, as a practical man, he also found much in the present state of all these things that displeased him greatly—above all the indefiniteness of the situation; but for the time being he also decided to keep silent and look . . . into Lizaveta Prokofyevna's eyes.
The family's joyful mood did not last long. The very next day Aglaya again quarreled with the prince, and so it went on incessantly, during all the days that followed. She would spend hours at a time making fun of the prince and all but turning him into a buffoon. True, they sometimes spent an hour or two sitting in the garden, in the gazebo, but it was noticed that at those times the prince almost always read the newspapers or some book to Aglaya.
"You know," Aglaya once said to him, interrupting the newspaper, "I've noticed that you are terribly uneducated; you don't know anything properly, if somebody asks you: neither precisely who, nor in what year, nor in what article. You're quite pathetic."
"I told you that I have little learning," the prince replied.
"What do you amount to after that? How can I respect you after that? Keep reading; or, no, stop reading, there's no need to."
And again that same evening there was a glimpse of something very mysterious on her part. Prince Shch. returned. Aglaya was very nice to him, asked many questions about Evgeny Pavlovich. (Prince Lev Nikolaevich had not arrived yet.) Suddenly Prince Shch. somehow permitted himself to allude to "the near and new change in the family," in response to a few words that Lizaveta Prokofyevna let drop about possibly having to postpone Adelaida's wedding again, so as to have both weddings take place together. It was impossible even to imagine how Aglaya flared up at "all these stupid suppositions"; and, among other things, the words escaped her that "she still had no intention of replacing anyone's mistresses."
These words struck everyone, but the parents most of all.
Lizaveta Prokofyevna, in a secret consultation with her husband, insisted on having a decisive talk with the prince concerning Nastasya Filippovna.
Ivan Fyodorovich swore that it was all only an "outburst," which came from Aglaya's "modesty"; that if Prince Shch. had not begun speaking about the wedding, there would have been no such outburst, because Aglaya herself knew, knew for certain, that it was all the slander of unkind people and that Nastasya Filippovna was going to marry Rogozhin; that the prince counted for nothing at all here, not only in any liaison; and even never had counted, if the whole truth were to be told.
But all the same the prince was not embarrassed by anything and went on being blissful. Oh, of course, he, too, sometimes noticed something dark and impatient, as it were, in Aglaya's eyes; but he believed more in something else, and the darkness vanished of itself. Once having believed, he could no longer be shaken by anything. Perhaps he was all too calm; so, at least, it seemed to Ippolit, who once chanced to meet him in the park.