But this swarthy, dark-skinned creature, with coarse hair, dark eyebrows, and a tiny moustache on her upper lip, she was certainly a wicked, giddy . . . 'gipsy' (Aratov could not imagine a harsher appellation)—what was she to him?
And yet Aratov could not succeed in getting out of his head this dark-skinned gipsy, whose singing and reading and very appearance were displeasing to him. He was puzzled, he was angry with himself. Not long before he had read Sir Walter Scott's novel, St. Ronan's Well (there was a complete edition of Sir Walter Scott's works in the library of his father, who had regarded the English novelist with esteem as a serious, almost a scientific, writer). The heroine of that novel is called Clara Mowbray. A poet who flourished somewhere about 1840, Krasov, wrote a poem on her, ending with the words:
'Unhappy Clara! poor frantic Clara!
Unhappy Clara Mowbray!'
Aratov knew this poem also. . . . And now these words were incessantly haunting his memory. . . . 'Unhappy Clara! Poor, frantic Clara!' . . . (This was why he had been so surprised when Kupfer told him the name of Clara Militch.)
Platosha herself noticed, not a change exactly in Yasha's temper — no change in reality took
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