"Why Granny?" asked Polina, with vexation. "I can't go to her… And I don't want to ask anyone's pardon," she added irritably.
"What's to be done!" I cried, "and how, oh, how could you love De Grieux! Oh, the scoundrel, the scoundrel! If you like I will kill him in a duel! Where is he now?"
"He's at Frankfurt, and will be there three days."
"One word from you and I'll set off to-morrow by the first train," I said, with stupid enthusiasm.
She laughed.
"Why, he'll say, maybe: 'Give me back the fifty thousand francs first. Besides, what should you fight him for? . . . What nonsense it is!"
"But where, where is one to get that fifty thousand francs?"
I repeated, grinding my teeth as though it had been possible to pick them up from the floor. "I say—Mr. Astley," I suggested, turning to her with a strange idea dawning upon me.
Her eyes flashed.
"What, do you mean to say you yourself want me to turn from you to that Englishman!" she said, looking in my face with a searching glance and smiling bitterly. For the first time in her life she addressed me in the second person singular.
I believe she was giddy with emotion at the moment, and all at once she sat down on the sofa as though she were exhausted.
It was as though I had been struck by a flash of lightning. I stood up and could not believe my eyes, could not believe my ears! Why, then she loved me! She had come to me and not to Mr. Astley!
She, she, a young girl, had come to my room in a hotel, so she had utterly compromised herself by her own act, and I, I was standing before her and still did not understand.
One wild idea flashed through my mind.
"Polina, give me only one hour. Stay here only one hour and… I'll come back. That's… that's essential! You shall see! Be here, be here!"
And I ran out of the room, not responding to her amazed and questioning look; she called something after me but I did not turn back.
Sometimes the wildest idea, the most apparently impossible thought, takes possession of one's mind so strongly that one accepts it at last as something substantial . . . more than that, if the idea is associated with a strong passionate desire, then
sometimes one will accept it at last as something fated, inevit-
