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Ostermann's flattering words and promise of a reward should therefore have struck him all the more pleasantly, but he still felt that same vaguely disagreeable feeling of moral nausea. "But what on earth is worrying me?" he asked himself as he rode back from the general. "Ilyin? No, he's safe. Have I disgraced myself in any way? No, that's not it."
Ilyin took her plump little hand in both of his, squeezed it, and slowly raised it to his lips. "I am not a schoolboy," he muttered. "I am not in the least tempted by friendship with the woman I love." "Enough, enough! It's settled and done with. We have reached the seat; let us sit down."
Two tall old peasants with wrinkled faces and scanty beards emerged from the tavern, smiling, staggering, and singing some incoherent song, and approached the officers. "Fine fellows!" said Rostov laughing. "Is there any hay here?" "And how like one another," said Ilyin. "A mo-o-st me-r-r-y co-o-m-pa...!" sang one of the peasants with a blissful smile.
Crimson with shame, humiliated not by Ilyin no, but by her own cowardice, by the shamelessness with which she, a chaste and high-principled woman, had allowed a man, not her husband, to hug her knees she had only one thought now: to get home as quickly as possible to her villa, to her family. The lawyer could hardly keep pace with her.
"Come, let us go," Ilyin continued. "I felt just now, as well as at the seat in the wood, that you are as helpless as I am, Sonia . . . . You are in the same plight! You love me and are fruitlessly trying to appease your conscience. . . ." Seeing that she was moving away, he caught her by her lace cuff and said rapidly: "If not today, then tomorrow you will have to give in!
When it got dark, visitors arrived. The men sat down in the dining-room to play cards; the ladies remained in the drawing-room and the verandah. The last to arrive was Ilyin. He was gloomy, morose, and looked ill. He sat down in the corner of the sofa and did not move the whole evening. Usually good-humoured and talkative, this time he remained silent, frowned, and rubbed his eyebrows.
"I hate and despise myself! My God! like some depraved schoolboy, I am making love to another man's wife, writing idiotic letters, degrading myself . . . ugh!" Ilyin clutched at his head, grunted, and sat down. "And then your insincerity!" he went on bitterly. "If you do dislike my disgusting behaviour, why have you come here? What drew you here?
Seeking for some explanation, she could not understand how it was she did not pull away the hand to which Ilyin was clinging like a leech, and why, like Ilyin, she hastily glanced to right and to left to see whether any one was looking. The clouds and the pines stood motionless, looking at them severely, like old ushers seeing mischief, but bribed not to tell the school authorities.
Like a boa-constrictor it gripped her limbs and her soul, and grew stronger every second, and no longer menaced her as it had done, but stood clear before her in all its nakedness. She sat for half an hour without stirring, not restraining herself from thinking of Ilyin, then she got up languidly and dragged herself to her bedroom. Andrey Ilyitch was already in bed.
And the officer gave them details of the Saltanov battle, which he had heard at the staff. Rostov, smoking his pipe and turning his head about as the water trickled down his neck, listened inattentively, with an occasional glance at Ilyin, who was pressing close to him.
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