Suddenly she heard a patter of bare feet in the passage, and Lisa, with a shawl thrown over her, ran in, pale and trembling, and almost fell on to her mother’s bed.
After saying good night to her mother that evening Lisa had gone alone to the room her uncle generally slept in. She put on a white dressing-jacket, and covering her long, thick, plaited hair with a shawl, she extinguished the candle, opened the window, and sat down, feet and all, on a chair, fixing her pensive eyes on the pond, now all glittering in the silvery light.
All her accustomed occupations and interests suddenly appeared to her in a new light: her capricious old mother, non-judging love for whom had become part of her soul; the decrepit but amiable old uncle; the domestic serfs and village serfs, who adored their young mistress; the milch cows and the calves, and all this nature, which had died and been renewed so many times, amid which she had grown up loving and beloved—all this that had given such easy and pleasant rest to her spirit, suddenly seemed unsatisfactory; it seemed dull and unnecessary. It was as if someone had said to her, “Little fool, little fool, for twenty years you have been trifling, serving someone without knowing why, and without knowing what life and happiness are!” This is what she was thinking, as she gazed into the depths of the moonlit, motionless garden, more intensely, far more intensely, than she had ever thought it before. And what had caused these thoughts? Not any sudden love for the Count, as one might have supposed. On the contrary, she did not like him. She could have been interested in the Cornet more easily, but he was plain, poor fellow, and silent. She kept involuntarily forgetting him, and recalling the image of the Count with anger and annoyance.
“No, that’s not it,” she said to herself. Her ideal had been so beautiful. It was an ideal that could have been loved on such a night, amid this nature, without infringing its beauty—an ideal never abridged to make it fit some coarse reality.