'What did you think of me yesterday, M'sieu Voldemar?' she asked after a brief pause. 'You thought ill of me, I expect?'
'I ... princess ... I thought nothing ... how can I?...' I answered in confusion.
'Listen,' she rejoined. 'You don't know me yet. I'm a very strange person; I like always to be told the truth. You, I have just heard, are sixteen, and I am twenty-one: you see I'm a great deal older than you, and so you ought always to tell me the truth ... and to do what I tell you,' she added. 'Look at me: why don't you look at me?'
I was still more abashed; however, I raised my eyes to her. She smiled, not her former smile, but a smile of approbation. 'Look at me,' she said, dropping her voice caressingly: 'I don't dislike that ... I like your face; I have a presentiment we shall be friends. But do you like me?' she added slyly.
'Princess ...' I was beginning.
'In the first place, you must call me Zinaïda Alexandrovna, and in the second place it's a bad habit for children'--(she corrected herself) 'for young people--not to say straight out what they feel. That's all very well for grown-up people. You like me, don't you?'
Though I was greatly delighted that she talked so freely to me, still I was a little hurt. I wanted to show her that she had not a mere boy to deal with, and assuming as easy and serious an air as I could, I observed, 'Certainly. I like you very much, Zinaïda Alexandrovna; I have no wish to conceal it.'
She shook her head very deliberately. 'Have you a tutor?' she asked suddenly.
'No; I've not had a tutor for a long, long while.'
I told a lie; it was not a month since I had parted with my Frenchman.
'Oh! I see then--you are quite grown-up.'
She tapped me lightly on the fingers. 'Hold your hands straight!' And she applied herself busily to winding the ball.
I seized the opportunity when she was looking down and fell to watching her, at first stealthily, then more and more boldly. Her face struck me as even more charming than on the previous evening; everything in it was so delicate, clever, and sweet. She was sitting with her back to a window covered with a white blind, the sunshine, streaming in through the blind, shed a soft light over her fluffy golden curls, her innocent neck, her sloping shoulders, and tender untroubled bosom. I gazed at her, and how dear and near she was already to me! It seemed to me I had known her a long while and had never known anything nor lived at all till I met her.... She was wearing a dark and rather shabby dress and an apron; I would gladly, I felt, have kissed every fold of that dress and apron. The tips of her little shoes peeped out from under her skirt; I could have bowed down in adoration to those shoes.... 'And here I am sitting before her,' I thought; 'I have made acquaintance with her ... what happiness, my God!' I could hardly keep from jumping up from my chair in ecstasy, but I only swung my legs a little, like a small child who has been given sweetmeats.