‘Well, what is it?’ he repeated, and he stamped his foot. He felt insulted, wounded, and at the same time against his will he was impressed by the beauty of this woman, standing so lightly and boldly before him ... she was tormenting him. He saw everything, all her charms--even the pink reflection of the delicate nails on her slender finger-tips, as they tightly clasped the dark bronze of the heavy candlestick--even that did not escape him ... while the insult cut deeper and deeper into his heart. And still Irina laughed. ‘What? you? you jealous?’ she brought out at last, and turning her back on her husband she went out of the room. ‘He’s jealous!’ he heard outside the door, and again came the sound of her laugh. Ratmirov looked moodily after his wife; he could not even then help noticing the bewitching grace of her figure, her movements, and with a violent blow, crushing the cigarette on the marble slab of the mantelpiece, he flung it to a distance. His cheeks had suddenly turned white, a spasm passed over the lower half of his face, and with a dull animal stare his eyes strayed about the floor, as though in search of something.... Every semblance of refinement had vanished from his face. Such an expression it must have worn when he was flogging the White Russian peasants. Litvinov had gone home to his rooms, and sitting down to the table he had buried his head in both hands, and remained a long while without stirring. He got up at last, opened a box, and taking out a pocket-book, he drew out of an inner pocket a photograph of Tatyana. Her face gazed out mournfully at him, looking ugly and old, as photographs usually do. Litvinov’s betrothed was a girl of Great Russian blood, a blonde, rather plump, and with the features of her face rather heavy, but with a wonderful expression of kindness and goodness in her intelligent, clear brown eyes, with a serene, white brow, on which it seemed as though a sunbeam always rested. For a long time Litvinov did not take his eyes from the photograph, then he pushed it gently away and again clutched his head in both hands. ‘All is at an end!’ he whispered at last, ‘Irina! Irina!’ Only now, only at that instant, he realised that he was irrevocably, senselessly, in love with her, that he had loved her since the very day of that first meeting with her at the Old Castle, that he had never ceased to love her. And yet how astounded, how incredulous, how scornful, he would have been, had he been told so a few hours back! ‘But Tanya, Tanya, my God! Tanya! Tanya!’ he repeated in contrition; while Irina’s shape fairly rose before his eyes in her black almost funereal garb, with the radiant calm of victory on her marble white face. XVI