Oh, sweet emotions, gentle harmony, goodness and peace of the softened heart, melting bliss of the first raptures of love, where are they, where are they?
Chapter VIII
The next morning, when I came down to tea, my mother scolded me – less severely, however, than I had expected – and made me tell her how I had spent the previous evening. I answered her in few words, omitting many details, and trying to give the most innocent air to everything.
'Anyway, they're people who're not comme il faut,' my mother commented, 'and you've no business to be hanging about there, instead of preparing yourself for the examination, and doing your work.'
As I was well aware that my mother's anxiety about my studies was confined to these few words, I did not feel it necessary to make any rejoinder; but after morning tea was over, my father took me by the arm, and turning into the garden with me, forced me to tell him all I had seen at the Zasyekins'.
A curious influence my father had over me, and curious were the relations existing between us.
He took hardly any interest in my education, but he never hurt my feelings; he respected my freedom, he treated me – if I may so express it – with courtesy,... only he never let me be really close to him.
I loved him, I admired him, he was my ideal of a man – and Heavens! how passionately devoted I should have been to him, if I had not been continually conscious of his holding me off! But when he liked, he could almost instantaneously, by a single word, a single gesture, call forth an unbounded confidence in him.
My soul expanded, I chattered away to him, as to a wise friend, a kindly teacher ... then he as suddenly got rid of me, and again he was keeping me off, gently and affectionately, but still he kept me off.
Sometimes he was in high spirits, and then he was ready to romp and frolic with me, like a boy (he was fond of vigorous physical exercise of every sort); once – it never happened a second time! – he caressed me with such tenderness that I almost shed tears...