uttered?'

But he shook his head at once, and murmured reproachfully, 'Actress!'

And again, at the same time, the vanity of the inexperienced nervous youth,
at first wounded, was now, as it were, flattered at having any way inspired
such a passion....

'Though by now,' he pursued his reflections, 'it's all over, of course....
I must have seemed absurd to her.'...

This idea was disagreeable to him, and again he was angry ... both with her
... and with himself. On reaching home, he shut himself up in his study. He
did not want to see Platosha. The good old lady came twice to his locked
door, put her ear to the keyhole, and only sighed and murmured her prayer.

'It has begun!' she thought.... 'And he only five-and-twenty! Ah, it's
early, it's early!'


VIII

All the following day Aratov was in very low spirits. 'What is it,
Yasha?' Platonida Ivanovna said to him: 'you seem somehow all loose ends
to-day!'... In her own peculiar idiom the old lady's expression described
fairly accurately Aratov's mental condition. He could not work and he did
not know himself what he wanted. At one time he was eagerly on the watch
for Kupfer, again he suspected that it was from Kupfer that Clara had got
his address ... and from where else could she 'have heard so much about
him'? Then he wondered: was it possible his acquaintance with her was