eyes, the dejected droop of her hair, seemed to express genuine
suffering.

I sat down beside her. We were both silent. For a long while she kept
twisting a twig in her hand; she bent her head, and uttered: 'Andrei
Nikolaevitch....' I noticed at once, by the twitching of her lips, that
she was getting ready to cry, and began consoling her, assuring her
hotly of Andrei's devotion.... She heard me, nodded her head
mournfully, articulated some indistinct words, and then was silent but
did not cry. The first moments I had dreaded most of all had gone off
fairly well. She began little by little to talk about Andrei. 'I know
that he does not love me now,' she repeated: 'God be with him! I can't
imagine how I am to live without him.... I don't sleep at nights, I
keep weeping.... What am I to do! What am I to do! ...' Her eyes filled
with tears. 'I thought him so kind ... and here ...' Varia wiped her
eyes, cleared her throat, and sat up. 'It seems such a little while
ago,' she went on: 'he was reading to me out of Pushkin, sitting with
me on this bench....' Varia's naive communicativeness touched me. I
listened in silence to her confessions; my soul was slowly filled with
a bitter, torturing bliss; I could not take my eyes off that pale face,
those long, wet eyelashes, and half-parted, rather parched lips.... And
meanwhile I felt ... Would you care to hear a slight psychological
analysis of my emotions at that moment? in the first place I was
tortured by the thought that it was not I that was loved, not I that as
making Varia suffer: secondly, I was delighted at her confidence; I
knew she would be grateful to me for giving her an opportunity of
expressing her sorrow: thirdly, I was inwardly vowing to myself to
bring Kolosov and Varia together again, and was deriving consolation
from the consciousness of my magnanimity ... in the fourth place, I
hoped, by my self-sacrifice, to touch Varia's heart; and then ... You