I looked across the fence – and stood transfixed. A strange sight met my gaze.

A few paces from me – on a lawn flanked by green raspberry canes – stood a tall, slender girl in a striped pink dress with a white kerchief on her head. Four young men clustered round her, and she was tapping them one by one on the forehead with those small grey flowers – I do not know their name, but they are well known to children: these flowers form little bags and burst loudly if you strike them against anything hard. The young men offered their foreheads so eagerly, and there was in the girl’s movements (I saw her in profile) something so enchanting, imperious and caressing, so mocking and charming, that I nearly cried out with wonder and delight, and should, I suppose, at that moment, have given everything in the world to have those lovely fingers tap my forehead too. My rifle slipped to the grass; I forgot everything; my eyes devoured the graceful figure, the lovely neck, the beautiful arms, the slightly dishevelled fair hair under the white kerchief – and the half-closed, perceptive eye, the lashes, the soft cheek beneath them…

‘Young man! Hey, young man!’ suddenly cried a voice near me. ‘Is it proper to stare at unknown young ladies like that?’

I started violently, and almost fainted: near me, on the other side of the fence, stood a man with close-cropped dark hair, looking at me ironically. At the same moment the girl too turned towards me…I saw large grey eyes in a bright, lively face, and suddenly this face began to quiver and laugh. There was a gleam of white teeth, a droll lift of the eyebrows…I blushed terribly, snatched up my gun, and pursued by resonant but not unkind laughter, fled to my room, threw myself on the bed and covered my face with my hands. My heart leaped within me. I felt very ashamed and unusually gay. I was extraordinarily excited.

After a rest I combed my hair, brushed myself, and came down to tea. The image of the young girl floated before me. My heart was leaping no longer but felt somehow deliciously constricted. ‘What is the matter with you,’ my father asked suddenly. ‘Shot a crow?’ I nearly told him everything, but checked the impulse and only smiled to myself. As I was going to bed, without quite knowing why, I spun round two or three times on one foot; then I put pomade on my hair, lay down, and slept like a top all night. Before morning I woke up for an instant, lifted my head, looked round me in ecstasy and fell asleep again.

3

‘How can I make their acquaintance?’ was my first thought when I woke in the morning. I strolled into the garden before breakfast, but did not go too near the fence and saw no one. After breakfast, I walked several times up and down the street in front of our house – and, from a distance, glanced once or twice at the windows…I fancied I could see her face behind the curtain; this alarmed me. I hurried away. ‘Still, I must get to know her,’ I kept thinking, as I paced uncertainly up and down the sandy stretch in front of the Neskootchny Park. ‘But how? That is the question.’ I recalled the smallest details of yesterday’s meeting. For some reason I had a particularly clear image of the way in which she had laughed at me. But as I was frantically making one plan after another, fate was already providing for me.

While I was out, my mother had received from her new neighbour a letter on grey paper, sealed with the sort of brown wax which is only used on Post Office forms, or on the corks of bottles of cheap wine. In this letter, illiterate and badly written, the princess begged my mother for her protection: my mother, the princess wrote, enjoyed the intimate acquaintance of important persons, upon whose favour depended the fortunes of herself and of her children, involved as she was in several vital lawsuits: ‘I tern to you,’ she wrote, ‘az one gentelwoman to another; moreover, I am delited to make use of this oportunity.’ Finally, she begged my mother’s permission to call upon her. I found my mother in a disagreeable frame of mind: my father was not at home, and she had no one to consult. Not to reply to ‘the gentlewoman’ – and she was a princess too – was impossible. But how to reply? That worried my mother. To write in French seemed inappropriate – on the other hand, her own Russian spelling was not too certain; she knew this and was not anxious to take the risk. She welcomed my return, therefore, and at once told me to call on the princess and explain to her by word of mouth that she would, of course, at all times be ready to offer any help within her power to her Ladyship, and begged the princess to do her the honour of calling upon her towards two o’clock.