Varenka, with her white kerchief on her black hair, surrounded
by the children, gaily and good-humoredly looking after them, and
at the same time visibly excited at the possibility of receiving
a declaration from the man she cared for, was very attractive.
Sergey Ivanovitch walked beside her, and never left off admiring
her. Looking at her, he recalled all the delightful things he
had heard from her lips, all the good he knew about her, and
became more and more conscious that the feeling he had for her
was something special that he had felt long, long ago, and only
once, in his early youth. The feeling of happiness in being near
her continually grew, and at last reached such a point that, as
he put a huge, slender-stalked agaric fungus in her basket, he
looked straight into her face, and noticing the flush of glad and
alarmed excitement that overspread her face, he was confused
himself, and smiled to her in silence a smile that said too much.
"If so," he said to himself, "I ought to think it over and make
up my mind, and not give way like a boy to the impulse of a
moment."
"I'm going to pick by myself apart from all the rest, or else my
efforts will make no show," he said, and he left the edge of the
forest where they were walking on low silky grass between old
birch trees standing far apart, and went more into the heart of
the wood, where between the white birch trunks there were gray
trunks of aspen and dark bushes of hazel. Walking some forty
paces away, Sergey Ivanovitch, knowing he was out of sight, stood
still behind a bushy spindle-tree in full flower with its rosy
red catkins. It was perfectly still all round him. Only
overhead in the birches under which he stood, the flies, like a
swarm of bees, buzzed unceasingly, and from time to time the
children's voices were floated across to him. All at once he
heard, not far from the edge of the wood, the sound of Varenka's
contralto voice, calling Grisha, and a smile of delight passed
over Sergey Ivanovitch's face. Conscious of this smile, he shook
his head disapprovingly at his own condition, and taking out a
cigar, he began lighting it. For a long while he could not get a
match to light against the trunk of a birch tree. The soft
scales of the white bark rubbed off the phosphorus, and the light
went out. At last one of the matches burned, and the fragrant
cigar smoke, hovering uncertainly in flat, wide coils, stretched
away forwards and upwards over a bush under the overhanging
branches of a birch tree. Watching the streak of smoke, Sergey
Ivanovitch walked gently on, deliberating on his position.