nearly eight o'clock
I do not know to this day why I did not break the engagement , it would have been sufficiently easy , but break it I did not and a week later , reluctantly , I went . Do you know how houses and streets of which you have observed nothing , afterwards , called out by some important event , leap into detail ? That night I swear that I saw nothing of that little street behind the Mariinsky Theatre . It was a fine ` white night ' at the end of May and the theatre was in a bustle of arrivals because it was nearly eight o'clock . Not at all the hour of Russian dinner , as you know , but Andrey Vassilievitch always liked to be as English as possible . I tell you that I saw nothing of the street and yet now I know that at the door of the little _ trakteer _ there were two men and a woman laughing , that an _ isvotchik _ was drawn up in front of a high white block of flats , asleep , his head fallen on his breast , that the wonderful light , faintly blue and misty like gauze hung down from the sky , down over the houses , but falling not quite on to the pavement which was hard and ugly and grey . The little street was very silent and quiet and had , like so many Petrograd streets , a decorous intimacy with the eighteenth century ghosts thronging its air ... `` Afterwards , how I was to know that street , every stone and corner of it !