In bad company

IV

Evelina had grown up, of course, since her first meeting with Pyotr; but young Stavruchenko's remark was very true. Her slender figure, at first glance, made her seem hardly more than a child. There was something, however, in her unhurried, even movements that gave her at times the dignity of a grown woman. Her face, too, made a similar impression. It is only among Slavs, I believe, that such faces are encountered. Fine, regular features, outlined in smooth, cool curves; blue eyes, calm and steady; pale cheeks, to which the colour rarely rose—not the pallor, this, that is ready always to blaze in the flush of passion, but, rather, the cool white of snow. Her straight, fair hair, lightly shadowing her marble temples, was confined in a heavy braid that seemed to draw her head back when she walked.
Pyotr, too, had grown and greatly matured. Anyone glancing at him just now, where he sat—pale and deeply moved—a little apart from the other young people, must have been strongly impressed by his handsome face, so unlike other faces in its expression, so sharply changing in response to every movement of the soul. His black hair lay in a graceful wave over his prominent forehead, already lightly furrowed. His cheeks now flushed with rapid colour, now, as rapidly, blanched to a dull pallor. A nervous tremor passed, at times, over his lower lip, turned down the least bit at its corners; and his mobile eyebrows were seldom still. But his beautiful eyes stared out in an even, unmoving gaze that gave his face a somewhat unusual tinge of gloom.
"And so," the student began, after some moments of silence, "Panna Evelina feels that these things we've been talking of are beyond the powers of a woman's mind; that woman's lot lies in the narrow sphere of kitchen and nursery."
There was a certain self-satisfaction in the young man's tone (for these ideas were brand new at the time), and a challenging note of irony. Again, for a moment, silence fell. Evelina flushed nervously.
"You're a little hasty in your conclusions," she returned finally. "I understood your talk well enough—which shows that it's quite within the powers of a woman's mind. What I said about destiny referred only to my own, personal life."
She fell silent, and bent over her work with such an air of preoccupation that the young man's courage began to fail him.
"How strangely you talk," he said perplexedly. "A person might think you'd planned your whole life out ahead, to the very grave."
"But what is there strange about that?" Evelina returned quietly. "Why, I'm sure even Ilya Ivanovich"— that was the cadet—"has his life all planned out already; and he's younger than me, isn't he?"
"That's perfectly true," the cadet put in, pleased to be drawn into the talk. "You know, I read a biography of N—, not long ago. He lived by plan, too. Married at twenty, and got his command at thirty-five."
The student laughed mockingly. Again, a slight flush rose to Evelina's cheeks.
"There it is," she said, after a pause, with cold asperity. "We have each our own destiny."
No one tried to debate the point any further. A grave hush fell over the little group of young people—a hush through which it was easy to sense a feeling of puzzled alarm. They all realised that, unwittingly, their talk must have touched some very delicate personal feeling; that Evelina's simple words veiled the quivering of a taut and sensitive chord.
No sound broke the hush but the rustling of the trees. It was growing dark, and the old garden seemed, somehow, out of humour.