All the following days Irina was busily occupied over her dress and her coiffure; on the day before the ball she felt unwell, she could not sit still, and twice she burst into tears in solitude; before Litvinov she wore the same uniform smile.... She treated him, however, with her old tenderness, but carelessly, and was constantly looking at herself in the glass. On the day of the ball she was silent and pale, but collected. At nine o’clock in the evening Litvinov came to look at her. When she came to meet him in a white tarlatan gown, with a spray of small blue flowers in her slightly raised hair, he almost uttered a cry; she seemed to him so lovely and stately beyond what was natural to her years. ‘Yes, she has grown up since this morning!’ he thought, ‘and how she holds herself! That’s what race does!’ Irina stood before him, her hands hanging loose, without smiles or affectation, and looked resolutely, almost boldly, not at him, but away into the distance straight before her. ‘You are just like a princess in a story book,’ said Litvinov at last. ‘You are like a warrior before the battle, before victory.... You did not allow me to go to this ball,’ he went on, while she remained motionless as before, not because she was not listening to him, but because she was following another inner voice, ‘but you will not refuse to accept and take with you these flowers?’ He offered her a bunch of heliotrope. She looked quickly at Litvinov, stretched out her hand, and suddenly seizing the end of the spray which decorated her hair, she said: ‘Do you wish it, Grisha? Only say the word, and I will tear off all this, and stop at home.’ Litvinov’s heart seemed fairly bursting. Irina’s hand had already snatched the spray.... ‘No, no, what for?’ he interposed hurriedly, in a rush of generous and magnanimous feeling, ‘I am not an egoist.... Why should I restrict your freedom ... when I know that your heart----’ ‘Well, don’t come near me, you will crush my dress,’ she said hastily. Litvinov was disturbed. ‘But you will take the nosegay?’ he asked. ‘Of course; it is very pretty, and I love that scent. _Merci_--I shall keep it in memory----’ ‘Of your first coming out,’ observed Litvinov, ‘your first triumph.’ Irina looked over her shoulder at herself in the glass, scarcely bending her figure. ‘And do I really look so nice? You are not partial?’ Litvinov overflowed in enthusiastic praises. Irina was already not listening to him, and holding the flowers up to her face, she was again looking away into the distance with her strange, as it were, overshadowed, dilated eyes, and the ends of her delicate ribbons stirred by a faint current of air rose slightly behind her shoulders like wings.