It, too, was always in play. It seemed at almost the same instant mocking, pensive and passionate. An infinite variety of feelings, light and swift, succeeded each other like shadows of clouds on a windy summer day, in her eyes and on her lips. Every one of her admirers was necessary to her. Byelovzorov, whom she sometimes called ‘my wild beast’, or sometimes simply ‘mine’, would gladly have leapt into the fire for her. With no confidence in his own brains or other qualities, he was constantly proposing marriage to her, implying that the others only talked. Maidanov was responsive to the poetic strain in her soul; somewhat cold by nature, like nearly all writers, he assured her fervently, and perhaps himself too, that he adored her. He composed endless verses in her honour, and recited them with an ardour at once affected and sincere. She sympathized with him and, at the same time, faintly mocked him. She did not really trust him, and after listening to his effusions for a while, used to make him read Pushkin, in order, as she used to say, to clear the air.

Looshin, the sarcastic doctor, so cynical in his talk, knew her best of all, and loved her more than the others, although he attacked her, both to her face and behind her back. She respected him, but did not spare him, and sometimes, with a peculiar malicious pleasure, used to make him feel her complete power over him. ‘I am a flirt: I have no heart: I have an actor’s nature,’ she once said to him in my presence. ‘All right then. Give me your hand and I will stick a pin into it, and you will feel ashamed in front of this young man. And it will hurt you, and still you will be kind enough to laugh, Mr Truthful.’ Looshin flushed, turned away, bit his lip, but in the end stretched out his hand. She pricked it, and he did begin to laugh, and she laughed too, and drove the pin quite deep, and kept glancing into his eyes, which ran helplessly in every direction.

Least of all did I understand the relations which existed between Zinaida and Count Malevsky. He was good-looking, clever and shrewd, but something false in him, something equivocal, was apparent even to me, a boy of sixteen, and I wondered that Zinaida did not notice it. But perhaps she did notice this falseness and was not repelled by it. An irregular education, odd habits and company, the perpetual presence of her mother, poverty and disorder in the house – everything, beginning with the freedom which the young girl enjoyed, with her consciousness of superiority over her surroundings, had developed in her a curious, half-contemptuous kind of carelessness and unfastidiousness. I remember how, no matter what happened – whether Vonifaty announced there was no sugar left, or perhaps some squalid piece of gossip suddenly became public, or some quarrel broke out between the guests – she would only shake her curls and say, ‘Fiddlesticks!’ and leave it at that.

But my blood, I remember, used to rise when Malevsky would sidle up to her like a sly fox, lean gracefully over the back of her chair, and begin to whisper into her ear with a self-satisfied and wheedling little smile – while she would fold her arms and glance at him attentively, then smile herself and shake her head.

‘What induces you to receive Monsieur Malevsky?’ I once asked her.

‘Ah, but he has such beautiful little moustaches,’ she replied. ‘And anyway that is not your province.’

‘Perhaps you think that I love him?’ she said to me on another occasion. ‘No! I cannot love people whom I find that I look down on. I need someone who would himself master me, but then, goodness me, I shall never come across anyone like that. I will never fall into anybody’s clutches, never, never.’

‘Does that mean that you will never love anyone?’

‘And what about you? Don’t I love you?’ she said, and flicked me on the nose with the tip of her glove.

Yes, Zinaida made fearful fun of me. For three weeks I saw her every day, and there was nothing that she didn’t do to me. She called on us seldom, and about this I was not sorry. In our house, she became transformed into a young lady, a princess, and this made me shy of her. I was frightened of giving myself away to my mother. She did not think at all well of Zinaida, and watched us with disapproval. I was not so nervous of my father.