Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Part one - VIII
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her, which made it quite impossible. She knew the man very
slightly, did not like him, and was cross because he was to
see her home; and it was not because her senses were stirred,
but from purely mental curiosity, that she turned the question
for a moment over in her mind: what if she did? — what would
be her feelings if she threw overboard will, self-control, and
her old faith? A voluptuously exciting shiver ran through her
at the thought. Was that kind of life more pleasant than
her own? She was not pleased with hers that evening; she
had again sat watching those who danced, she had tasted the
wine and had listened to the music, and she had felt the
dreadful loneliness of being young and not knowing how to dance
or how to speak the language of the other young people and
share their laughter, but she had tried to smile and look and
talk as if she enjoyed it. And when she walked home in the
icy-cold spring night she knew that at eight o’clock next
morning she had to be at the school to act as substitute for one of
the teachers. She was working that time at her big picture,
but everything she did seemed dull and meaningless, and at six
o’clock she had to go home and teach mathematics to her private
pupils. She was very hard worked; she sometimes felt her
nerves strained to the utmost, and did not know how she would
be able to carry on till the long vacation.
For an instant she felt herself drawn by the man’s cynicism
— or thought she was — but she smiled at him and said “no”
in the same dry and direct way that he had asked her. He
was a fool, after all, for he began preaching to her — first
commonplace flattery, then sentimental nonsense about youth and
spring, the right and freedom of passion, and the gospel of the
flesh, until she simply laughed at him and hailed a passing
cab.
And now — she was old enough now to understand those who
brutally refused to deny themselves anything in life — who
simply gave in and drifted, but the greenhorns, who boasted of
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