Agrenev had said apropos of something:
"Balmont, Blok, Brusov, Sologub..."
She interrupted him hastily--a slender little reed: "As a whole I
know little of foreign writers ..."
In the town--neither in the high-school, the library, nor the
newspapers--did they know of Balmont or Blok, but Olya loved to
declaim by rote from Kozlov, and she spoke French.
The factory lived its dark, noisy, unwholesome life sunk in poverty
beneath the surface, steeped in luxury above; the little town lived
amid the fields, scared and pressed down by the factory, but still
carrying on its own individual life.
Beyond it, on the side away from the factory, lay the pass called the
Wolf's Ravine. On the right, close to the river, was a grove where
couples walked. They never descended to the ravine, because it was so
unpoetic, a treeless, shallow, dull, unterrifying spot. Yet it
skirted the hills, dominated the surrounding country; and people
lying flat in the channel at its summit could survey the locality for
a mile round without being seen themselves.
Alexander Alexandrovitch was a married man. The shepherd lads tending
their herds at pasture began to notice how every evening a man on a
bicycle turned off the main road into the ravine, and how--soon
after--a girl hurried past them following in his steps, like a reed
blown in the wind.
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