“I love you. You are my life, my happiness—everything to me! Forgive the avowal, but I have not the strength to suffer and be silent. I ask not for love in return, but for sympathy. Be at the old arbour at eight o’clock this evening. … To sign my name is unnecessary I think, but do not be uneasy at my being anonymous. I am young, nice-looking … what more do you want?”
When Pavel Ivanitch Vyhodtsev, a practical married man who was spending his holidays at a summer villa, read this letter, he shrugged his shoulders and scratched his forehead in perplexity.
“What devilry is this?” he thought. “I’m a married man, and to send me such a queer … silly letter! Who wrote it?”
Pavel Ivanitch turned the letter over and over before his eyes, read it through again, and spat with disgust.
“ ‘I love you’ ” … he said jeeringly. “A nice boy she has pitched on! So I’m to run off to meet you in the arbour! … I got over all such romances and fleurs d’amour years ago, my girl. … Hm! She must be some reckless, immoral creature. … Well, these women are a set! What a whirligig—God forgive us!—she must be to write a letter like that to a stranger, and a married man, too! It’s real demoralisation!”
In the course of his eight years of married life Pavel Ivanitch had completely got over all sentimental feeling, and he had received no letters from ladies except letters of congratulation, and so, although he tried to carry it off with disdain, the letter quoted above greatly intrigued and agitated him.
An hour after receiving it, he was lying on his sofa, thinking: