Then her arms
dropped, she laughed, fastening her cloak--
"There's your nobility, Ivan Andreievitch--theatrical, all of it. I know
what I am, and I know what I shall do. Nicholas will live to eighty; I
also. I shall hate him, but I shall he in an agony when he cuts his
finger. I shall never see Sherry again. Later, he will marry a fresh
English girl like an apple.... I, because I am weak, soft putty--I have
made it so."
She turned away from me, staring desperately at the wall. When she
looked back to me her face was grey.
She smiled. "What a baby you are!... But take care of yourself. Don't
come on Monday if it's bad weather. Good-bye."
She went.
After a bad, sleepless night, and a morning during which I dozed in a
nightmareish kind of way, I got up early in the afternoon, had some tea,
and about six o'clock started out.
It was a lovely evening; the spring light was in the air, the tufted
trees beside the canal were pink against the pale sky, and thin layers
of ice, like fragments of jade, broke the soft blue of the water. How
pleasant to feel the cobbles firm beneath one's feet, to know that the
snow was gone for many months, and that light now would flood the
streets and squares! Nevertheless, my foreboding was not raised, and the
veils of colour hung from house to house and from street to street could
not change the realities of the scene.
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