Valeria broke into a clear, fragile laugh. And Liudmilla's eyes looked gay and mischievous again. She walked into her room impetuously and sprinkled herself with Korylopsis--the sweet, piquant, odour seized upon her seductively. She walked out into the street, in her best clothes, feeling distraught; and an indiscreet attractiveness was wafted from her. "Perhaps I shall meet him," she thought. She did meet him. "Well, you're a nice one," she exclaimed reproachfully and yet happily. Sasha felt both confused and glad. "I had no time," he said. "There are too many lessons to do. Really I had no time." "You're fibbing, little one, but come along." He resisted for a while, but it was clear that he was glad to let Liudmilla take him away with her. And Liudmilla brought him home. "I've found him," she said to her sisters triumphantly, and taking Sasha by the shoulders, she led him into her room. Sasha, putting his hands inside his belt, stood uneasily in the middle of the room, and felt both happy and sad. There seemed to be an odour of new pleasant scents there, and in this odour there was something that provoked and irritated the nerves like the contact of living rough little snakes. [1] "Rosotchki" means "little roses" and also "rods" and "strokes from a rod." CHAPTER XVIII Peredonov was returning from the lodgings of one of his pupils. Quite suddenly he was caught in a drizzling rain. He tried to think where he could shelter for a while, so as not to spoil his new silk umbrella in the rain. Across the way was a detached, two-storeyed, stone house; on it was the brass plate of the Notary Public, Goudayevsky. The notary's son was a pupil in the second form of the _gymnasia._ Peredonov decided to go in. Incidentally he would make a complaint against the notary's son. He found both parents at home. They met him with a good deal of fuss. Everything was done there in that way.