Varenka, with her white kerchief over her dark hair, surrounded by children, good-naturedly and cheerfully occupied with them, and apparently excited by the possibility of a declaration from a man she liked, was very attractive. Sergei Ivanovich walked beside her and kept admiring her. Looking at her, he recalled all the nice conversation he had heard from her, all the good he had heard about her, and realized more and more that the feeling he had for her was something special, which he had experienced long, long ago, and only once, in his early youth. The feeling of joy at her nearness, ever increasing, reached the point where, as he put into her basket a huge mushroom he had found, with a slender foot and upturned edge, he glanced into her eyes and, noticing the blush of joyful and frightened excitement that spread over her face, became confused himself and silently smiled to her the sort of smile that says all too much.
‘If it’s so,’ he said to himself, ‘I must think it over and decide, and not give myself like a boy to some momentary infatuation.’
‘I’ll go now and gather mushrooms on my own, otherwise my acquisitions won’t be noticed,’ he said and went alone away from the edge of the wood, where they were walking over silky, low grass among sparse old birches, towards the depths of the wood, where grey aspen trunks and dark hazel bushes showed among the white birch trunks. Going some forty paces away and stepping behind a spindle-tree in full bloom with its pinkish-red catkins, Sergei Ivanovich stopped, knowing he could not be seen. Around him it was perfectly still. Only the flies made a ceaseless noise like a swarm of bees in the tops of the birches he was standing under, and now and then the children’s voices reached him. Suddenly, from the edge of the wood not far away, he heard Varenka’s contralto calling Grisha, and a joyful smile lit up Sergei Ivanovich’s face. Conscious of this smile, Sergei Ivanovich shook his head disapprovingly at the state he was in and, taking out a cigar, began to light it. For a long time he was unable to strike a match against the birch trunk. The tender film of the white bark stuck to the phosphorus and the flame went out. Finally a match flared up, and the strong-scented smoke of the cigar, clearly outlined in a broad, undulating sheet, spread forward and up over the bush under the hanging birch branches. Following the strip of smoke with his eyes, Sergei Ivanovich walked on at a slow pace, reflecting on his state.
‘And why not?’ he thought. ‘If it were a momentary flash or passion, if I experienced only this attraction - this mutual attraction (I may call it “mutual”) - but felt that it went against my whole mode of life, if I felt that in yielding to this attraction I would betray my calling and my duty ... but it’s not so. The only thing I can say against it is that, when I lost Marie, I told myself I would remain faithful to her memory. That is all I can say against my feeling... That’s important,’ Sergei Ivanovich said to himself, feeling at the same time that for him personally this consideration could have no importance at all, but would only spoil his poetic role in the eyes of others. ‘But apart from that, search as I may, I won’t find anything to say against my feeling. If I were to choose with my mind alone, I couldn’t find anything better.’
