It was near seven o'clock when Boris came from the pearl-button
factory where he earned, at piece-work, from six to seven dollars a
week. As Tanya heard his footsteps through the door she sprang to her
feet and, with a joyous gleam in her eye, she ran out to meet him at
the head of the stairs. In her delight she at once forgot the
Maupassant article.
After an affectionate greeting she said, with burlesque
supplication:--
"Don't get angry, Borya, but I am afraid I have flunked on my soup
again."
His fatigued smile expanded.
"The worst of it," she pursued, "is the fact that this time my
negligence resulted from something which is against you. Yes, I have
got something that will show you that Mr. Boris has not monopolized
all the wisdom in the world; that other people know something, too.
Yes, sir!" she beamingly concluded, in English.
"You must have received the July number, have you?" he burst out,
flushing with anticipated delight.
"Not your booseeness" (business), she replied in English, playfully
pronouncing the words as in Russian. "You know you can't get it before
supper is over; so what is the use asking?" she added, in the tongue
of her native country. With which she briskly busied herself about the
table and the stove, glowing with happiness, every inch of her a woman
in the long-awaited presence of the man she loves.
Boris's shabby working clothes, his few days' growth of beard and
general appearance of physical exhaustion vainly combined, as it were,
to extinguish the light of culture and intellectuality from his looks;
they only succeeded in adding the tinge of martyrdom to them. As to
Tatyana, she had got so far habituated to the change that she was only
occasionally aware of it. And when she was, it would move her to pity
and quicken her love for him. At such moments his poor workaday
clothes would appear to her as something akin to the prison garb of
the exiled student in Siberia.
"Let me just take a glance at the table of contents," he begged,
brokenly, washing himself at the sink.
"After supper."
"Then do you tell me what there is to read. Anything interesting?"
"After supper."
"Or is it that you begrudge me the few minutes' talk we have
together?" she resumed more earnestly, after a slight pause. "The
whole day I am all alone, and when he comes he plunges into some book
or other or falls asleep like a murdered man. All there remains is the
half hour at supper; so that, too, he would willingly deprive me of."
It was Tanya's standing grievance, and she would deliver herself of it
on the slightest provocation, often quite irrelevantly.
After supper she read to him the passage which she regarded as an
indorsement of her view upon Maupassant. When she had finished and
turned to him a face full of triumphant inquiry, she was rather
disappointed by the lukewarm readiness of his surrender.
"Oh, I see. It is rather an interesting point," he remarked lazily.
He was reclining on the stiff carpet-covered lounge in the front room,
while she was seated in the rocker, in front of him. It flashed across
her mind that such unusual tractability in him might augur some
concession to be exacted from her. She flew into a mild little passion
in advance, but made no inquiries, and only said, with good-natured
sarcasm:--
"Of course, once it is printed in 'Russian Thought,' it is 'rather an
interesting point,' but when it was only Tanya who made it, why then
it was mere rubbish."
"You know I never said it was rubbish, Tanya," he returned
deprecatingly.