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Updated: May 22, 2025
"Why are you staying?" said Zinaida Fyodorovna, with a show of vexation, though at the same time she was radiant with delight. "Why do you? You are not accustomed to spending your evenings at home, and I don't want you to alter your habits on my account. Do go out as usual, if you don't want me to feel guilty." "No one is blaming you," said Orlov.
It was evident that Zinaida Fyodorovna contemplated settling with us for good, and meant to make the flat her home. She came back with Orlov between nine and ten.
"God alone knows how wretched I was. But I laugh because I can't believe in it. I keep fancying that my sitting here drinking coffee with you is not real, but a dream." Then, still speaking French, she described how she had broken with her husband the day before and her eyes were alternately full of tears and of laughter while she gazed with rapture at Orlov.
When she cries, I am ready to swear eternal love and cry myself." Pekarsky did not understand; he scratched his broad forehead in perplexity and said: "You really had better take another flat for her. It's so simple!" "She wants me, not the flat. But what's the good of talking?" sighed Orlov. "I only hear endless conversations, but no way out of my position.
When Orlov did not want to keep an appointment with Zinaida Fyodorovna, or when he forgot that he had promised to go and see her, I drove to Znamensky Street, put a letter into her hands and told a lie. And the result of it all was quite different from what I had expected when I became a footman.
"Well, there's no help for it," sighed Orlov, getting up and, as it were, giving me to understand that our conversation was over. I took my hat. "We've only been sitting here half an hour, and how many questions we have settled, when you come to think of it!" said Orlov, seeing me into the hall. "So I will see to that matter. . . . I will see Pekarsky to-day. . . . Don't be uneasy."
I knew beforehand that if Zinaida Fyodorovna liked anything, it would be certain not to please Orlov. When on coming in from shopping she made haste to show him with pride some new purchase, he would glance at it and say coldly that the more unnecessary objects they had in the flat, the less airy it would be.
At first I thought it was one of the moneylenders, Gruzin's creditors, who sometimes used to come to Orlov for small payments on account; but when he came into the hall and flung open his coat, I saw the thick brows and the characteristically compressed lips which I knew so well from the photographs, and two rows of stars on the uniform.
"As if there weren't enough of them already! What pleasure is there in this trade for me? I sit in a cellar and sew. Then I shall die. They say that the cholera is coming.... And after that? Gregory Orlov lived, made shoes and died of the cholera. What does that signify? And why was it necessary that I should live, make shoes and die, tell me?"
'Only I didn't wear a cap, but a hat a la bergere de Trianon; and though I was powdered, yet my hair shone through it, positively shone through it like gold! Malania Pavlovna was foolish to the point of 'holy innocence, as it is called; she chattered quite at random, as though she were hardly aware herself of what dropped from her lips and mostly about Orlov.
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