‘That is as may be, but that is not the point either. What matters is that just as my love for her was reaching its peak, on the last day of Shrovetide, I attended a ball at the house of the district marshal of the nobility, a genial old man who was wealthy, well known for his hospitality, and a chamberlain at court. His wife, as good-natured as he was, received the guests wearing a puce-coloured velvet gown, a diamond ferronnière on her forehead, and with her ageing, puffy shoulders and bosom on display, as in those portraits of the Empress Elizaveta Petrovna. It was a splendid ball: a beautiful ballroom with galleries for the musicians, and an orchestra, well known at that time, which was made up of serfs belonging to a landowner who was an amateur musician, and a veritable ocean of champagne. Although I was fond of champagne I didn’t drink any, for I was already drunk without wine, drunk with love; but I still danced to the point of exhaustion – quadrilles, waltzes, polkas; and as far as possible of course, I danced them with Varenka. She was wearing a white dress with a pink sash, white kid gloves reaching almost to her slender, pointed elbows, and white satin shoes. The mazurka was filched from me by a most unpleasant engineer by the name of Anisimov – even today I cannot forgive him – who had asked her for this dance almost the moment she arrived, whereas I came in late, having called at the hairdresser’s to collect my gloves. So I did not dance the mazurka with her, but with a German girl whom I had been pursuing some time before. But I’m afraid I treated her quite rudely that evening – not talking to her, not looking at her: I had eyes only for that tall, shapely figure in the white dress with the pink sash, her flushed, radiant face with its dimples, and her gentle, affectionate eyes. I wasn’t the only one either: everybody looked at her and admired her, men and women alike, though she eclipsed them all. It was impossible not to admire her.
‘By decree, so to speak, I danced the mazurka with someone else, but in fact I danced practically all the rest of the time with her. Without the least sign of embarrassment she would walk the whole length of the ballroom and come up to me, and I would jump up from my seat without waiting to be asked, and she would thank me with a smile for my quick-wittedness. When we were led before her so that she could choose a partner, and she was unable to guess the particular “quality” I was supposed to be representing, she was obliged to give her hand to some other young man, but she shrugged her slender shoulders and smiled at me as a sign of her regret and as a consolation.
‘When the figures of the mazurka were being danced to a waltz I danced with her for quite a long time and she, breathless and smiling, said to me “
‘What do you mean, you were hardly aware of your body? I should think you were well aware of it when you had your arm round her waist; and not just your body, but hers as well,’ said one of the guests.
Ivan Vasilyevich suddenly blushed, and replied with annoyance, almost shouting: ‘Yes, that’s modern young people for you. You don’t see anything except the body. In our day it was not like that. The more deeply I was in love, the more disembodied she became for me. Nowadays you look at women’s feet, their ankles, and more besides: you mentally undress the women you are in love with; but for me, as Alphonse Karr would say – he was a good writer, too – the object of my love was always clad in robes of bronze. Not only did we not undress them in our minds, we did our best to cover their nakedness, like the virtuous son of Noah in the Bible. But of course you wouldn’t understand that …’
‘Don’t bother with him. What happened next?’ said one of us.
‘Yes. So there I was dancing with her, and losing all sense of time. The musicians were by now pretty desperately tired, you know how it is towards the end of a ball, and they kept on repeating the same section of a mazurka, and the mothers and fathers had already got up from the card tables and were waiting for supper to be served, and the manservants were running about faster than ever, carrying things. It was gone two o’clock. I had to make the most of those last minutes. Yet again I asked her to dance, and for the hundredth time we floated down the ballroom.
‘ “So may I have the quadrille after supper?” I asked as I led her back to her seat.
‘ “Of course, if they don’t take me home before then,” she said, smiling.
‘ “I won’t allow it,” I said.
‘ “Hand me my fan,” she said.
‘ “It makes me sad even to do that,” I said as I returned her simple white fan to her.
‘ “Well, here you are, just so that you won’t grieve,” she said, plucking a feather from the fan and giving it to me.
