All this she did without a word, with a kind of amused deliberation, and with the same bright, sly smile on her slightly parted lips. She began to wind the wool round a bent card, and then suddenly cast a look at me, a look so swift and radiant that I could not help lowering my eyes for an instant. When her eyes, for the most part half closed, opened to their full extent, her face would be utterly transformed, as if flooded with light. ‘What did you think of me yesterday, Monsieur Woldemar?’ she asked, after a short pause. ‘You disapproved of me, I suppose.’

‘I?…Princess…I didn’t think anything…How could I?’ I replied in confusion.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘You don’t know me yet. I am very strange. I wish to be told the truth always. You are sixteen, I hear, and I am twenty-one. You see, I am much older than you. That is why you must always tell me the truth…and do what I tell you,’ she added. ‘Look at me…Why don’t you look at me?’

I was plunged into even deeper confusion; however, I did raise my eyes and look at her. She smiled, not as before, but as if to encourage me. ‘Look at me,’ she said, lowering her voice caressingly. ‘I do not find it disagreeable. I like your face. I have a feeling that we shall be friends. And do you like me?’ she added archly.

‘Princess,’ I was beginning.

‘First of all, you must call me Zinaida Alexandrovna, and secondly, how queer that children’ (she corrected herself), ‘that young gentlemen do not say straight out what they feel. That is all very well for grown-ups. You do like me, don’t you?’

Although I was very pleased that she should be talking so frankly to me, still, I was a little hurt. I wished to show her that she was not dealing with a mere boy, and so, putting on as solemn a manner as I could, I said as casually as I was able: ‘Of course I like you very much, Zinaida Alexandrovna. I have no wish to conceal it.’

She shook her head with deliberation. ‘Have you a tutor?’ she suddenly asked.

‘No, I haven’t had one for a long time.’ This was a lie. Scarcely a month had passed since I had parted with my Frenchman.

‘Yes, I see; you are quite grown up.’ She rapped me lightly over the fingers.

‘Hold your hands straight.’ And she busily began to wind the ball of wool.

I took advantage of the fact that her eyes remained lowered, to scrutinize her features, at first stealthily and then more and more boldly. Her face appeared to me even more lovely than on the previous day. Everything in it was so delicate, clever and charming. She was sitting with her back to a window which was shaded by a white blind. A sunbeam filtering through the blind shed a gentle light on her soft golden hair, on her pure throat, on her tranquil breast. I gazed at her, and how dear she already was to me, and how near. It seemed to me that I had known her for a long time, and that before her I had known nothing and had not lived….