I beg anyone who has ever been in love to remember how one usually hurries home after dropping the letter in the box, rapidly gets into bed and pulls up the quilt in the full conviction that as soon as one wakes up in the morning one will be overwhelmed with memories of the previous day and look with rapture at the window, where the daylight will be eagerly making its way through the folds of the curtain.

Well, to facts. . . .  Next morning at midday, Sasha’s maid brought me the following answer:  “I am delited be sure to come to us to day please I shall expect you.  Your S.”

Not a single comma.  This lack of punctuation, and the misspelling of the word “delighted,” the whole letter, and even the long, narrow envelope in which it was put filled my heart with tenderness.  In the sprawling but diffident handwriting I recognised Sasha’s walk, her way of raising her eyebrows when she laughed, the movement of her lips. . . .  But the contents of the letter did not satisfy me.  In the first place, poetical letters are not answered in that way, and in the second, why should I go to Sasha’s house to wait till it should occur to her stout mamma, her brothers, and poor relations to leave us alone together?  It would never enter their heads, and nothing is more hateful than to have to restrain one’s raptures simply because of the intrusion of some animate trumpery in the shape of a half-deaf old woman or little girl pestering one with questions.  I sent an answer by the maid asking Sasha to select some park or boulevard for a rendezvous.  My suggestion was readily accepted.  I had struck the right chord, as the saying is.

Between four and five o’clock in the afternoon I made my way to the furthest and most overgrown part of the park.  There was not a soul in the park, and the tryst might have taken place somewhere nearer in one of the avenues or arbours, but women don’t like doing it by halves in romantic affairs; in for a penny, in for a pound—­if you are in for a tryst, let it be in the furthest and most impenetrable thicket, where one runs the risk of stumbling upon some rough or drunken man.  When I went up to Sasha she was standing with her back to me, and in that back I could read a devilish lot of mystery.  It seemed as though that back and the nape of her neck, and the black spots on her dress were saying:  Hush! . . .  The girl was wearing a simple cotton dress over which she had thrown a light cape.  To add to the air of mysterious secrecy, her face was covered with a white veil.  Not to spoil the effect, I had to approach on tiptoe and speak in a half whisper.

From what I remember now, I was not so much the essential point of the rendezvous as a detail of it.  Sasha was not so much absorbed in the interview itself as in its romantic mysteriousness, my kisses, the silence of the gloomy trees, my vows. . . .  There was not a minute in which she forgot herself, was overcome, or let the mysterious expression drop from her face, and really if there had been any Ivan Sidoritch or Sidor Ivanitch in my place she would have felt just as happy.  How is one to make out in such circumstances whether one is loved or not?  Whether the love is “the real thing” or not?