As it struck seven I was convinced that she would not come.
By 8:30 I presented the appearance of the most pitiful creature in the world. My coat was fastened with all its buttons, collar turned up, cap tilted over my nose, which was blue with cold; my hair was over my forehead, my moustache and eyelashes were whitening with rime, and my teeth gently chattered. From my shambling gait, and bowed back, I might have been taken for a fairly hale old man returning from a party at the almshouse.
And She was the cause of all this—She! "Oh, the Dev——! No, I won't. Perhaps she could not get away, or she is ill, or dead. She's dead!"—and I swore.
II
"Eugenia Nikolaevna will be there to-night," one of my companions, a student, remarked to me, without the slightest arrière pensée. He could not know how that I had waited for her in the frost from seven to half-past eight.
"Indeed," I replied, as in deep thought, but within my soul there leapt out: "Oh, the Dev——!" "There" meant at the Polozovs' evening party. Now the Polozovs were people with whom I was not upon visiting terms. But this evening I would be there.
