Sofya Petrovna, who had not expected that the con- versation would take such a turn, drew away from Ilyin and looked into his face, frightened. Tears came into his eyes, his lips trembled, and his face assumed an im- ploring, hungry expression.
"I love you," he muttered, bringing his eyes close to her big, frightened eyes. "You are so beautiful! I am suffering now, but I'd be willing to sit here all my life agonizing, if I could only look into your eyes. But . . . do not speak, I implore you!"
Caught unawares, Sofya Petrovna tried to think quickly, quickly of something to say to stop him. "I'U go away," she decided, but no sooner did she make a movement to rise, than he was kneeling before her. He clasped her knees, looking into her face and speaking, passionately, ardently, eloquently. Terrified and dazed, she did not hear his words. For some reason now, at this dangerous moment while her knees were being agreeably pressed, as though she were in a warm bath, she was trying, with a sort of exasperated malice, to find the meaning of her o^ sensations. She was vexed that instead of brimming over with protesting virtue, she felt weak, indolent, and empty, like one who is half- seas over; only deep down within her a remote frag- ment of her consciousness was maliciously taunting her: "Then why don't you leave? So this is as it should be, eh?"
Seeking to understand herself, she could not grasp how it was that she did not pull away her hand to which Ilyin was clinging like a leech, and why she, like Ilyin, hastily glanced right and left to see if anyone was look- ing. The clouds and the pines were motionless, gazing at them severely like monitors seeing mischief but bribed not to report to the authorities. The sentry stood like a post on the embankment and seemed to have his eye on the bench.
"Let him look," thought Sofya Petrovna.
"But . . . but listen," she said at last with a note of despair in her voice. "What will this lead to? What will happen next?"
"I don't know, I don't know," he whispered, waving the disagreeable questions away with his hand.
The hoarse, tremulous whistle of the train was heard. This chilly, alien sound of humdrum prosiness roused Sofya Petrovna.
"I can't stay. . . . It's time for me to leave," she said, getting up quickly. "The train is coming in • . • Andrey is on it! He has to have his dinner."
Sofya Petrovna, her face burning, turned toward the embankment. At first the engine slowly crawled by, then came the cars. It was not the local passenger train, as she had supposed, but a freight train. The boxcars filed past in a long string against the background of the white church, one after another, like the days of a man's life, and it seemed as though there was no end to them.
But at last the train passed, and the caboose with its lanterns and the conductor had disappeared behind the foliage. Sofya Petrovna turned round abruptly and with- out looking at Ilyin walked rapidly back along the lane. She had regained her self-possession. Blushing with shame, humiliated, not by Ilyin, no, but by her own faint-heartedness, by the shamelessness with which she, a chaste and blameless woman, had allowed a strange man to hug her knees—she had only one thought now: to get back as quickly as possible to her summer cot- tage, to her family. The lawyer could hardly keep pace with her. Turning from the lane into a narrow path, she glanced at him so rapidly that she saw nothing but the sand on his knees, and signaled to him not to follow her.
Back home, Sofya Petrovna stood motionless in the middle of her room for some five minutes and looked now at the window and now at her desk.
"You vile creature!" she scolded herself. "You vile creature!"
To spite herself, she recalled in every detail, conceal- ing nothing, how although all these days she had been averse to Ilyin's advances, something had driven her to have an explanation with him; and what was more, when he lay at her feet she had enjoyed it immensely. She remembered it all without sparing herself, and now, choking with shame, she would have liked to slap her own face again and again.
"Poor Andrey!" she said to herself, trying to assume the tenderest possible expression, as she thought of her husband. "Varya, my poor little girl, doesn't know what a mother she has! Forgive me, my dears! I love you very, very much!"
And wishing to prove to herself that she was still a good wife and mother, and that corruption had not yet touched "the institution of the family" of which she had spoken to Ilyin, Sofya Petrovna ran to the kitchen and raged at the cook for not yet having laid the table for Andrey Ilyich. She tried to picture to herself her hus- band's hungry and exhausted appearance, spoke of how hard he worked, and laid the table for him with her own hands, which she had never done before. Then she found her daughter Varya, picked her up in her arms and hugged her ardently. The child seemed to her rather heavy and irresponsive, but she was loath to ad- mit this to herself, and she began explaining to the child what a nice, kind, and honorable man her papa was.
Yet when Andrey Ilyich arrived soon afterwards she hardly greeted him. The rush of sham feeling had al- ready subsided, without proving anything to her, but only vexing and exasperating her by its lack of genuine- ness. She was sitting by the window, feeling unhappy and cross. It is only when they are in trouble that peo- ple can understand how difficult it is to control their thoughts and emotions. Sofya Petrovna said afterwards that there was "a confusion of feeling within her which it was as difficult to disentangle as to count sparrows rapidly flying in a flock." From the fact, for instance, that she was not overjoyed to see her husband, that she did not like the way he behaved at dinner, she suddenly concluded that she was beginning to hate him.
Andrey Ilyich, languid with hunger and fatigue, at- tacked the sausage while waiting for the soup to be served, and ate it chewing noisily and moving his tem- ples.
"My God!" thought Sofya Petrovna. "I love and re- spect him, but . . • why does he chew his food so disgustingly?"
The disorder in her thoughts was no less than the disorder in her emotions. Like all persons inexperienced in warding off unpleasant thoughts, Madam Lubyant- zeva did her utmost not to think of her predicament, and the harder she tried the more sharply did Ilyin, the sand on his knees, the fluffy clouds, the train stand out in her imagination.
"And why did I go there today, fool that I ^?" she tormented herself. "And am I really so weak that I can- not trust myself?"
Fear has big eyes. By the time Andrey Ilyich was finishing his last course, she had firmly decided to tell her husband everything and to flee from danger!
"I must have a serious talk with you, Andrey," she began after dinner while her husband who was about to lie down for a nap was removing his coat and boots. "Well?"
"Let's go away!"
"H'm! . . . Where shall we go? It is too early in the season to go back to town."
"No, let's take a trip or something—"
"A trip . . ." muttered the notary, stretching. '1 dream of that myself, but where are we to get the money? And who is to take care of the office?"
And reflecting a little, he added, "Of course, it is dull for you here. Go alone if you like."
Sofya Petrovna agreed, then it occurred to her that Ilyin would welcome such an opportunity, and would travel with her on the same train, in the same car . . . As she reflected, she looked at her husband, now full of food but stili languid. For some reason, her glance rested on his feet, very small, almost feminine, in striped socks; there was a thread sticking up at the tip of each sock.