middle finger was wanting--Karl having long ago cut it off to wear over
a sore nail.
However, I put it on--not without some diffident contemplation of the
blank left by the middle finger and of the ink-stained edges round the
vacant space.
'If only Natalia Savishna had been here,' I reflected, 'we should
certainly have found some gloves. I can't go downstairs in this
condition. Yet, if they ask me why I am not dancing, what am I to say?
However, I can't remain here either, or they will be sending upstairs to
fetch me. What on earth am I to do?' and I wrung my hands.
'What are you up to here?' asked Woloda as he burst into the room. 'Go
and engage a partner. The dancing will be beginning directly.'
'Woloda,' I said despairingly, as I showed him my hand with two fingers
thrust into a single finger of the dirty glove, 'Woloda, you, never
thought of this.'
'Of what?' he said impatiently. 'Oh, of gloves,' he added with a
careless glance at my hand. 'That's nothing. We can ask Grandmamma what
she thinks about it,' and without further ado he departed downstairs. I
felt a trifle relieved by the coolness with which he had met a situation
which seemed to me so grave, and hastened back to the drawing-room,
completely forgetful of the unfortunate glove which still adorned my
left hand.
Cautiously approaching Grandmamma's arm-chair, I asked her in a whisper:
'Grandmamma, what are we to do? We have no gloves.'
'What, my love?'
'We have no gloves,' I repeated, at the same time bending over towards
her and laying both hands on the arm of her chair.
'But what is that?' she cried as she caught hold of my left hand.
'Look, my dear!' she continued, turning to Madame Valakhin. 'See how
smart this young man has made himself to dance with your daughter!'
As Grandmamma persisted in retaining hold of my hand and gazing with a
mock air of gravity and interrogation at all around her, curiosity was
soon aroused, and a general roar of laughter ensued.
I should have been infuriated at the thought that Seriosha was present
to see this, as I scowled with embarrassment and struggled hard to free
my hand, had it not been that somehow Sonetchka's laughter (and she was
laughing to such a degree that the tears were standing in her eyes
and the curls dancing about her lovely face) took away my feeling
of humiliation. I felt that her laughter was not satirical, but only
natural and free; so that, as we laughed together and looked at one
another, there seemed to begin a kind of sympathy between us. Instead
of turning out badly, therefore, the episode of the glove served only
to set me at my ease among the dreaded circle of guests, and to make
me cease to feel oppressed with shyness. The sufferings of shy people
proceed only from the doubts which they feel concerning the opinions
of their fellows. No sooner are those opinions expressed (whether
flattering or the reverse) than the agony disappears.
How lovely Sonetchka looked when she was dancing a quadrille as my
vis-a-vis, with, as her partner, the loutish Prince Etienne! How
charmingly she smiled when, en chaine, she accorded me her hand! How
gracefully the curls, around her head nodded to the rhythm, and how
naively she executed the jete assemble with her little feet!
In the fifth figure, when my partner had to leave me for the other
side and I, counting the beats, was getting ready to dance my solo, she
pursed her lips gravely and looked in another direction; but her fears
for me were groundless. Boldly I performed the chasse en avant and
chasse en arriere glissade, until, when it came to my turn to move
towards her and I, with a comic gesture, showed her the poor glove with
its crumpled fingers, she laughed heartily, and seemed to move her tiny
