He recalled any number of women and girls he knew, but could not recall one who would combine to such a degree all, precisely all, the qualities that he, reasoning coldly, would wish to see in his wife. She had all the loveliness and freshness of youth, yet she was not a child, and if she loved him, she loved him consciously, as a woman should love: that was one thing. Another: she was not only far from worldliness, but obviously had a loathing for the world, yet at the same time she knew that world and had all the manners of a woman of good society, without which a life’s companion was unthinkable for Sergei Ivanovich. Third: she was religious, and not unaccountably religious and good, like a child, like Kitty, for instance, but her life was based on religious convictions. Even to the smallest details, Sergei Ivanovich found in her everything he could wish for in a wife: she was poor and alone, so she would not bring a heap of relations and their influence into the house, as he saw with Kitty, but would be obliged to her husband in all things, which he had also always wished for his future family life. And this girl, who combined all these qualities in herself, loved him. He was modest, but he could not fail to see it. And he loved her. One negative consideration was his age. But his breed was long-lived, he did not have a single grey hair, no one would have taken him for forty, and he remembered Varenka saying that it was only in Russia that people considered themselves old at the age of fifty, that in France a fifty-year-old man considered himself
v
‘Varvara Andreevna, when I was still very young, I made up for myself an ideal of the woman I would love and whom I would be happy to call my wife. I have lived a long life, and now for the first time I have met in you what I have been seeking. I love you and offer you my hand.’
Sergei Ivanovich was saying this to himself when he was just ten steps away from Varenka. Kneeling down and protecting a mushroom from Grisha with her hands, she was calling little Masha.
‘Here, here! There are small ones! Lots!’ she said in her sweet, mellow voice.
Seeing Sergei Ivanovich approaching, she did not get up and did not change her position, but everything told him that she felt him approaching and was glad of it.
‘So, did you find any?’ she asked, turning her beautiful, quietly smiling face to him from behind the white kerchief.
‘Not one,’ said Sergei Ivanovich. ‘And you?’
She did not answer him, busy with the children around her.
‘That one, too, by the branch.’ She pointed Masha to a small mushroom, its resilient pink cap cut across by a dry blade of grass it had sprung up under. She stood up when Masha picked the mushroom, breaking it into two white halves. ‘This reminds me of my childhood,’ she added, stepping away from the children with Sergei Ivanovich.
They went on silently for a few steps. Varenka saw that he wanted to speak. She guessed what it was about and her heart was gripped by the excitement of joy and fear. They went far enough away so that no one could hear them, and still he did not begin to speak. It would have been better for Varenka to remain silent. After a silence it would have been easier to say what they wanted to say than after talking about mushrooms; but against her own will, as if inadvertently, Varenka said:
‘So you didn’t find any? But then there are always fewer inside the wood.’
Sergei Ivanovich sighed and made no answer. He was vexed that she had begun talking about mushrooms. He wanted to bring her back to her first words about her childhood; but, as if against his will, after being silent for a while, he commented on her last words.
‘I’ve heard only that the white boletus grows mostly on the edge, though I’m unable to identify it.’
