“Evidently the sound of the piano is purposely made to drown the sound of their voices, their kisses⁠ ⁠… perhaps. My God! What was aroused in me! Even to think of the beast that then lived in me fills me with horror! My heart suddenly contracted, stopped, and then began to beat like a hammer. My chief feeling, a usual whenever I was enraged, was one of self pity. ‘In the presence of the children! of their nurse!’ thought I. Probably I looked awful, for Lisa gazed at me with strange eyes. ‘What am I to do?’ I asked myself. ‘Go in? I can’t: heaven only knows what I should do. But neither can I go away.’ The nurse looked at me as if she understood my position. ‘But it is impossible not to go in,’ I said to myself, and I quickly opened the door. He was sitting at the piano playing those arpeggios with his large white upturned fingers. She was standing in the curve of the piano, bending over some open music. She was the first to see or hear, and glanced at me. Whether she was frightened and pretended not to be, or whether she was really not frightened, anyway she did not start or move but only blushed, and that not at once.