What did you say?” Madame Odintsov interposed eagerly, “with . . . my beauty?”
Bazarov frowned.
“Never mind about that,” he muttered; “I wanted to say that I don’t properly understand why you settled in the country!”
“You don’t understand it . . . yet you explain it to yourself somehow?”
“Yes . . . I suppose that you prefer to remain in one place because you are self-indulgent, very fond of comfort and ease and very indifferent to everything else.”
Madame Odintsov smiled again.
“You absolutely refuse to believe that I am capable of being carried away by anything?”
Bazarov glanced at her from under his brows.
“By curiosity — perhaps, but in no other way.”
“Indeed?
Well, now I understand why we have become such friends, you are just like me — ”
“We have become friends . . .,” Bazarov muttered in a hollow voice.
“Yes. . . . Why, I had forgotten that you want to go away.”
Bazarov got up.
The lamp burned dimly in the darkening, isolated fragrant room; the blind swayed from time to time and let in the stimulating freshness of the night and its mysterious whispers.
Madame Odintsov did not stir, but a hidden excitement gradually took possession of her . . . It communicated itself to Bazarov.
He suddenly felt he was alone with a young and beautiful woman . . .
“Where are you going?” she said slowly.
He made no answer and sank into a chair.
“And so you consider me a placid, pampered, self-indulgent creature,” she continued in the same tone and without taking her eyes off the window. “But I know so much about myself that I am unhappy.”
“You unhappy!
What for?
Surely you can’t attach any importance to slanderous gossip!”
Madame Odintsov frowned.
She was upset that he had understood her words in that way.
“Such gossip does not even amuse me, Evgeny Vassilich, and I am too proud to allow it to disturb me.
I am unhappy because . . . I have no desires, no love of life.
You look at me suspiciously; you think those are the words of an aristocrat who sits in lace on a velvet chair.
I don’t deny for a moment that I like what you call comfort, and at the same time I have little desire to live.
Reconcile that contradiction as best you can.
Of course it is all sheer romanticism to you.”
Bazarov shook his head;
“You are healthy, independent and rich; what more is left?
What do you want?”
“What do I want,” repeated Madame Odintsov and sighed. “I am very tired, I am old, I feel as if I had lived a very long time.
Yes, I am old — ” she added, softly drawing the ends of her shawl over her bare arms.
Her eyes met Bazarov’s and she blushed slightly. “So many memories are behind me; life in Petersburg, wealth, then poverty, then my father’s death, marriage, then traveling abroad, as was inevitable . . . so many memories and so little worth remembering, and in front of me — a long, long road without a goal . . . I have not even the desire to go on.”
“Are you so disappointed?” asked Bazarov.
“No,” answered Madame Odintsov, speaking with deliberation, “but I am dissatisfied.
I think if I were strongly attached to something . . .”
“You want to fall in love,” Bazarov interrupted her, “but you can’t love. That is your unhappiness.”
Madame Odintsov started looking at the shawl over her sleeve.
“Am I incapable of love?” she murmured.
“Hardly!
But I was wrong in calling it unhappiness.
On the contrary, a person should rather be pitied when that happens to him.”
“When what happens to him?”
“Falling in love.”
“And how do you know that?”
“I have heard it,” answered Bazarov angrily.