"Well, you know Missy is waiting for you," she said. "Go and find her. She wants to play a new piece by Grieg to you; it is most interesting."
"She did not mean to play anything; the woman is simply lying, for some reason or other," thought Nekhludoff, rising and pressing Sophia Vasilievna's transparent and bony, ringed hand.
Katerina Alexeevna met him in the drawing-room, and at once began, in French, as usual: "I see the duties of a juryman act depressingly upon you."
"Yes; pardon me, I am in low spirits to-day, and have no right to weary others by my presence," said Nekhludoff.
"Why are you in low spirits?"
"Allow me not to speak about that," he said, looking round for his hat.
"Don't you remember how you used to say that we must always tell the truth? And what cruel truths you used to tell us all!
Why do you not wish to speak out now?
Don't you remember, Missy?" she said, turning to Missy, who had just come in.
"We were playing a game then," said Nekhludoff, seriously; "one may tell the truth in a game, but in reality we are so bad—I mean I am so bad—that I, at least, cannot tell the truth."
"Oh, do not correct yourself, but rather tell us why we are so bad," said Katerina Alexeevna, playing with her words and pretending not to notice how serious Nekhludoff was.
"Nothing is worse than to confess to being in low spirits," said Missy. "I never do it, and therefore am always in good spirits."
Nekhludoff felt as a horse must feel when it is being caressed to make it submit to having the bit put in its mouth and be harnessed, and to-day he felt less than ever inclined to draw. "Well, are you coming into my room? We will try to cheer you up."
He excused himself, saying he had to be at home, and began taking leave.
Missy kept his hand longer than usual.
"Remember that what is important to you is important to your friends," she said. "Are you coming tomorrow?"
"I hardly expect to," said Nekhludoff; and feeling ashamed, without knowing whether for her or for himself, he blushed and went away.
"What is it?
Comme cela m'intrigue," said Katerina Alexeevna. "I must find it out.
I suppose it is some affaire d'amour propre; il est tres susceptible, notre cher Mitia."
"Plutot une affaire d'amour sale," Missy was going to say, but stopped and looked down with a face from which all the light had gone—a very different face from the one with which she had looked at him. She would not mention to Katerina Alexeevna even, so vulgar a pun, but only said,
"We all have our good and our bad days."
"Is it possible that he, too, will deceive?" she thought; "after all that has happened it would be very bad of him."
If Missy had had to explain what she meant by "after all that has happened," she could have said nothing definite, and yet she knew that he had not only excited her hopes but had almost given her a promise.
No definite words had passed between them—only looks and smiles and hints; and yet she considered him as her own, and to lose him would be very hard.
CHAPTER XXVIII. THE AWAKENING.
"Shameful and stupid, horrid and shameful!" Nekhludoff kept saying to himself, as he walked home along the familiar streets.
The depression he had felt whilst speaking to Missy would not leave him.
He felt that, looking at it externally, as it were, he was in the right, for he had never said anything to her that could be considered binding, never made her an offer; but he knew that in reality he had bound himself to her, had promised to be hers. And yet to-day he felt with his whole being that he could not marry her.
"Shameful and horrid, horrid and shameful!" he repeated to himself, with reference not only to his relations with Missy but also to the rest. "Everything is horrid and shameful," he muttered, as he stepped into the porch of his house.
"I am not going to have any supper," he said to his manservant Corney, who followed him into the dining-room, where the cloth was laid for supper and tea. "You may go."
"Yes, sir," said Corney, yet he did not go, but began clearing the supper off the table.
Nekhludoff looked at Corney with a feeling of ill-will.
He wished to be left alone, and it seemed to him that everybody was bothering him in order to spite him.
When Corney had gone away with the supper things, Nekhludoff moved to the tea urn and was about to make himself some tea, but hearing Agraphena Petrovna's footsteps, he went hurriedly into the drawing-room, to avoid being seen by her, and shut the door after him.
In this drawing-room his mother had died three months before.
On entering the room, in which two lamps with reflectors were burning, one lighting up his father's and the other his mother's portrait, he remembered what his last relations with his mother had been.
And they also seemed shameful and horrid.
He remembered how, during the latter period of her illness, he had simply wished her to die.
He had said to himself that he wished it for her sake, that she might be released from her suffering, but in reality he wished to be released from the sight of her sufferings for his own sake.
Trying to recall a pleasant image of her, he went up to look at her portrait, painted by a celebrated artist for 800 roubles.
She was depicted in a very low-necked black velvet dress.
There was something very revolting and blasphemous in this representation of his mother as a half-nude beauty.
It was all the more disgusting because three months ago, in this very room, lay this same woman, dried up to a mummy.
And he remembered how a few days before her death she clasped his hand with her bony, discoloured fingers, looked into his eyes, and said:
"Do not judge me, Mitia, if I have not done what I should," and how the tears came into her eyes, grown pale with suffering.
"Ah, how horrid!" he said to himself, looking up once more at the half-naked woman, with the splendid marble shoulders and arms, and the triumphant smile on her lips. "Oh, how horrid!"
The bared shoulders of the portrait reminded him of another, a young woman, whom he had seen exposed in the same way a few days before.
It was Missy, who had devised an excuse for calling him into her room just as she was ready to go to a ball, so that he should see her in her ball dress.
It was with disgust that he remembered her fine shoulders and arms.