But this swarthy, dark-skinned creature, with coarse hair, dark eyebrows,
and a tiny moustache on her upper lip, she was certainly a wicked, giddy
... 'gipsy' (Aratov could not imagine a harsher appellation)--what was she
to him?

And yet Aratov could not succeed in getting out of his head this
dark-skinned gipsy, whose singing and reading and very appearance were
displeasing to him. He was puzzled, he was angry with himself. Not long
before he had read Sir Walter Scott's novel, _St. Ronan's Well_ (there
was a complete edition of Sir Walter Scott's works in the library of his
father, who had regarded the English novelist with esteem as a serious,
almost a scientific, writer). The heroine of that novel is called Clara
Mowbray. A poet who flourished somewhere about 1840, Krasov, wrote a poem
on her, ending with the words:

'Unhappy Clara! poor frantic Clara!
Unhappy Clara Mowbray!'

Aratov knew this poem also.... And now these words were incessantly
haunting his memory.... 'Unhappy Clara! Poor, frantic Clara!' ... (This
was why he had been so surprised when Kupfer told him the name of Clara
Militch.)

Platosha herself noticed, not a change exactly in Yasha's temper--no change
in reality took place in it--but something unsatisfactory in his looks and
in his words. She cautiously questioned him about the literary matinee at
which he had been present; muttered, sighed, looked at him from in front,
from the side, from behind; and suddenly clapping her hands on her thighs,
she exclaimed: 'To be sure, Yasha; I see what it is!'