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There were heaps of guests about a thousand people, and all of them princes or generals, and there was music, and I danced But, Katenka" I broke off, "you are not listening to me?" "Oh yes, I am listening. You said that you danced ?" "Why are you so serious?" "Well, one cannot ALWAYS be gay." "But you have changed tremendously since Woloda and I first went to Moscow.
My fatigue and hunger were increasing in equal proportions, so that I eagerly followed every sign of the approach of luncheon. First came the housemaid with a cloth to wipe the plates, Next, the sound of crockery resounded in the dining-room, as the table was moved and chairs placed round it, After that, Mimi, Lubotshka, and Katenka.
She rarely looked at the coffin, yet whenever she did so her face expressed a sort of childish fear. Katenka stood near her mother, and, despite her lengthened face, looked as lovely as ever. Woloda's frank nature was frank also in grief. He stood looking grave and as though he were staring at some object with fixed eyes.
"But one cannot always remain the same one must change a little sometimes," replied Katenka, who had an inveterate habit of pleading some such fatalistic necessity whenever she did not know what else to say. However, on the present occasion, I was not satisfied that any such inevitable necessity for "changing sometimes" existed, and asked further: "WHY is it necessary?"
We felt that the distance between a boy still taking lessons under a tutor and a man who danced at real, grown-up balls was too great to allow of their exchanging mutual ideas. Katenka, too, seemed grown-up now, and read innumerable novels; so that the idea that she would some day be getting married no longer seemed to me a joke.
What was the matter with my sister I could not conceive, but she was now so agitated that the tears were starting from her eyes. Finally her confusion grew uncontrollable, and vented itself in rage against both herself and Katenka, who appeared to be teasing her. "Just because I have the secret of which you know," she went on, with anger ringing through her tone, "you purposely go and upset me!
On the Thursday in Easter week Papa, my sister, Katenka, and Mimi went away into the country, and no one remained in my grandmother's great house but Woloda, St. Jerome, and myself.
Meanwhile Katenka and I were sitting by the tea-table, and somehow she began to talk about her favourite subject love. I was in the right frame of mind to philosophise, and began by loftily defining love as the wish to acquire in another what one does not possess in oneself.
I had now satisfied my curiosity, and, being cramped with sitting in one position so long, desired to join in the tittering and fun which I could hear going on in the dark store-room behind me. Some one took my hand and whispered, "Whose hand is this?" Despite the darkness, I knew by the touch and the low voice in my ear that it was Katenka.
Besides, in any case, we shall have to separate SOME day. You are rich you have Petrovskoe, while we are poor Mamma has nothing." "You are rich," "we are poor" both the words and the ideas which they connoted seemed to me extremely strange. Hitherto, I had conceived that only beggars and peasants were poor and could not reconcile in my mind the idea of poverty and the graceful, charming Katenka.
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