would sit and sit in the Osinins' cheerless drawing-room, stealthily watching Irina, his heart slowly and painfully throbbing and suffocating him; and she would seem angry or bored, would get up and walk about the room, look coldly at him as though he were a table or chair, shrug her shoulders, and fold her arms. Or for a whole evening, even when talking with Litvinov, she would purposely avoid looking at him, as though denying him even that grace. Or she would at last take up a book and stare at it, not reading, but frowning and biting her lips. Or else she would suddenly ask her father or brother aloud: 'What 's the German for patience?' He tried to tear himself away from the enchanted circle in which he suffered and struggled impotently like a bird in a trap; he went away from Moscow for a week. He nearly went out of his mind with misery and dulness; he returned quite thin and ill to the Osinins'. . . . Strange to say, Irina too had grown perceptibly thinner during those days; her face had grown pale, her cheeks were wan. . . . But she met him with still greater coldness, with almost malignant indifference; in reality, he had intensified that secret wound he had dealt at her pride. . . . She tortured him in this way for two months. Then everything was transformed in one day. It was as though love
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