Until dinner time she remained secluded, and spent the hours in pacing
her room with her hands clasped behind her. Occasionally she would halt
before the window-panes or a mirror, to draw a handkerchief across a
spot on her neck which seemed to be burning like fire. And every time
that she did so she asked herself what had led her to force Bazarov's
confidence; also, whether or not she had had any suspicion that such a
thing might result.
"Yes, I _am_ to blame," she finally decided. "Yet I could not have
foreseen the whole _dénouement_."
Then she recalled Bazarov's almost animal face as he rushed to seize
her in his arms. And at the thought she blushed.
"Or is it that----?" Here she stopped, and shook back her curls. The
reason was that she had seen herself in a mirror, and, as in a flash,
had learnt from that image of a head thrown back, with a mysterious
smile lurking between a pair of half-parted lips and in a pair of
half-closed eyes, something which confounded her.
"No, no! Again no!" she cried. "Only God knows what might come of it.
Such things are not to be played with. Freedom from worry is the chief
thing in the world."
Nor had her _sangfroid_ really been shattered. Rather, she was a
little agitated--so little that, when, for some unknown reason, she
shed a tear or two, those tears owed their origin not to any deep
emotion, to the fact that she was wounded, but to a sense of having
involuntarily been at fault in permitting certain vague yearnings--a
certain consciousness of the transience of life, a certain desire for
novelty--to urge her towards the boundary line. And over that boundary
line she had peeped. And in front of her she had beheld, not an abyss,
but a waste, a sheer ugliness.