"I told him I hadn't any, that I had had no friend but Mashenka, and she had gone away to Pskov. "'Listen,' he said, 'would you like to go to the theatre with me?' "'To the theatre. What about grandmother?' "'But you must go without your grandmother's knowing it,' he said. "'No,' I said, 'I don't want to deceive grandmother. Good-bye.' "'Well, good-bye,' he answered, and said nothing more. "Only after dinner he came to see us; sat a long time talking to grandmother; asked her whether she ever went out anywhere, whether she had acquaintances, and suddenly said: 'I have taken a box at the opera for this evening; they are giving _The Barber of Seville_. My friends meant to go, but afterwards refused, so the ticket is left on my hands.' '_The Barber of Seville_,' cried grandmother; 'why, the same they used to act in old days?' "'Yes, it's the same barber,' he said, and glanced at me. I saw what it meant and turned crimson, and my heart began throbbing with suspense. "'To be sure, I know it,' said grandmother; 'why, I took the part of Rosina myself in old days, at a private performance!' "'So wouldn't you like to go to-day?' said the lodger. 'Or my ticket will be wasted.' "'By all means let us go,' said grandmother; why shouldn't we? And my Nastenka here has never been to the theatre.' "My goodness, what joy! We got ready at once, put on our best clothes, and set off. Though grandmother was blind, still she wanted to hear the music; besides, she is a kind old soul, what she cared most for was to amuse me, we should never have gone of ourselves. "What my impressions of _The Barber of Seville_ were I won't tell you; but all that evening our lodger looked at me so nicely, talked so nicely, that I saw at once that he had meant to test me in the morning when he proposed that I should go with him alone. Well, it was joy! I went to bed so proud, so gay, my heart beat so that I was a little feverish, and all night I was raving about _The Barber of Seville_. "I expected that he would come and see us more and more often after that, but it wasn't so at all. He almost entirely gave up coming. He would just come in about once a month, and then only to invite us to the theatre. We went twice again. Only I wasn't at all pleased with that; I saw that he was simply sorry for me because I was so hardly treated by grandmother, and that was all. As time went on, I grew more and more restless, I couldn't sit still, I couldn't read, I couldn't work; sometimes I laughed and did something to annoy grandmother, at another time I would cry. At last I grew thin and was very nearly ill. The opera season was over, and our lodger had quite given up coming to see us; whenever we met--always on the same staircase, of course--he would bow so silently, so gravely, as though he did not want to speak, and go down to the front door, while I went on standing in the middle of the stairs, as red as a cherry, for all the blood rushed to my head at the sight of him.