First Love Read Free

answered, getting up, and stuttering in my excitement.
    “And your father’s name?”
    “Petrovitch.”
    “Ah! I used to know a commissioner of police whose name was Vladimir Petrovitch too. Vonifaty! don’t look for my keys; the keys are in my pocket.”
    The young girl was still looking at me with the same smile, faintly fluttering her eyelids, and putting her head a little on one side.
    “I have seen Monsieur Voldemar before,” she began. (The silvery note of her voice ran through me with a sort of sweet shiver.) “You will let me call you so?”
    “Oh, please,” I faltered.
    “Where was that?” asked the princess.
    The young princess did not answer her mother.
    “Have you anything to do just now?” she said, not taking her eyes off me.
    “Oh, no.”
    “Would you like to help me wind some wool? Come in here, to me.”
    She nodded to me and went out of the drawing room. I followed her.
    In the room we went into, the furniture was a little better, and was arranged with more taste. Though, indeed, at the moment, I was scarcely capable of noticing anything; I moved as in a dream and felt all through my being a sort of intense blissfulness that verged on imbecility.
    The young princess sat down, took out a skein of red wool and, motioning me to a seat opposite her, carefully untied the skein and laid it across my hands. All this she did in silence with a sort of droll deliberation and with the same bright sly smile on her slightly parted lips. She began to wind the wool on a bent card, and all at once she dazzled me with a glance so brilliant and rapid, that I could not help dropping my eyes. When her eyes, which were generally half closed, opened to their full extent, her face was completely transfigured; it was as though it were flooded with light.
    “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