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Updated: July 20, 2025
You are afraid to show me to your friends; there's no greater infliction for you than to go about with me in the street. . . . Isn't that true? Why haven't you introduced me to your father or your cousin all this time? Why is it? No, I am sick of it at last," cried Zinaida Fyodorovna, stamping. "I demand what is mine by right. You must present me to your father."
"I'm miserable," said Nadyezhda Fyodorovna beginning to cry, and to hide her tears she turned away. "I'm miserable too," said Kirilin, "but what of that?" Kirilin was silent for a space, then he said distinctly and emphatically: "I repeat, madam, that if you do not give me an interview this evening, I'll make a scandal this very evening."
After the evening on which they had talked of his official work, Orlov, who could not endure tears, unmistakably began to avoid conversation with her; whenever Zinaida Fyodorovna began to argue, or to beseech him, or seemed on the point of crying, he seized some plausible excuse for retreating to his study or going out.
"Why do you speak to me like that?" said Zinaida Fyodorovna, stepping back as though in horror. "What for? George, for God's sake, think what you are saying!" Her voice quivered and broke; she was evidently trying to restrain her tears, but she suddenly broke into sobs. "George, my darling, I am perishing!" she said in French, dropping down before Orlov, and laying her head on his knees.
Zinaida Fyodorovna was lying on the couch, and raising herself on her elbow, she looked towards me. Unable to bring myself to speak, I walked slowly by, and she followed me with her eyes. I stood for a little time in the dining-room and then walked by her again, and she looked at me intently and with perplexity, even with alarm.
Dear George can't understand that feeling." He drank some more. Pale and lean, with his dinner-napkin over his chest like a little pinafore, he ate greedily, and raising his eyebrows, kept looking guiltily, like a little boy, first at Zinaida Fyodorovna and then at me. It seemed as though he would have begun crying if I had not given him the grouse or the jelly.
"It's not quite so hot to-day as yesterday?" said Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, shrinking at the coarse touch of the naked cook. "Yesterday I almost died of the heat." "Oh, yes, my dear; I could hardly breathe myself. Would you believe it? I bathed yesterday three times! Just imagine, my dear, three times! Nikodim Alexandritch was quite uneasy."
"Merci, darling," he said after dinner, and kissed Nadyezhda Fyodorovna on the forehead. Going back into his study, he spent five minutes in walking to and fro, looking at his boots; then he sat down on his sofa and muttered: "Run away, run away! We must define the position and run away!"
Then I will tell you what happened the following Thursday. That day Zinaida Fyodorovna dined at Content's or Donon's. Orlov returned home alone, and Zinaida Fyodorovna, as I learnt afterwards, went to the Petersburg Side to spend with her old governess the time visitors were with us. Orlov did not care to show her to his friends.
He flushed crimson and added: "Kirilin was at my rooms last night complaining that Laevsky had found him with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, and all that sort of thing." "Yes, we know that too," said Boyko. "Well, you see, then . . . Laevsky's hands are trembling and all that sort of thing . . . he can scarcely hold a pistol now.
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