I

and she involuntarily tried to do what pleased him. And as everything she did pleased him, all her actions in his presence were done with especial elation. It pleased him to see her running races with a beautiful wolfhound that jumped up and licked her flushed and radiant face; it pleased him when, on the smallest provocation, she burst into infectiously ringing peals of laughter; it pleased him when, with her eyes still laughing, she assumed a serious expression during the priest’s dull sermons. It pleased him when, with extraordinary exactitude and drollery, she imitated⁠—now her old nurse, now a tipsy neighbour, and now Migoúrski himself⁠—passing instantaneously from one character to another. But what pleased him most of all was her happiness, her rapturous joy of life. It was as if she had only now fully discovered the delight of living, and hastened to make the most of it. This peculiar joy of life pleased him, and it was evoked and intensified by the very fact that she knew that her joy of life delighted him. So Albína alone knew why Migoúrski, having come to propose to Wánda, left without having done so. Though she would never have ventured to tell this to anyone, and did not even acknowledge it to herself, yet in the depth of her soul she knew that he had wished to fall in love with her sister, but had fallen in love with her⁠—Albína. She was very much surprised at this, regarding herself as quite insignificant beside the clever, well-educated, beautiful Wánda; but she could not help knowing that it was true, and could not help being glad of it, for she herself loved Migoúrski with her whole soul: loved him as one can only love for the first time, and only once in a lifetime.