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“Do you remember how I took you to the dance at the club?” he asked. “It was dark and rainy then. . .”

The warmth was glowing now in his heart, and he longed to talk, to rail at life. . . .

“Ech!” he said with a sigh. “You ask how I am living. How do we live here? Why, not at all. We grow old, we grow stout, we grow slack. Day after day passes; life slips by without colour, without expressions, without thoughts. . . . In the daytime working for gain, and in the evening the club, the company of card-players, alcoholic, raucous-voiced gentlemen whom I can’t endure. What is there nice in it?”

“Well, you have work–a noble object in life. You used to be so fond of talking of your hospital. I was such a queer girl then; I imagined myself such a great pianist. Nowadays all young ladies play the piano, and I played, too, like everybody else, and there was nothing special about me. I am just such a pianist as my mother is an authoress. And of course I didn’t understand you then, but afterwards in Moscow I often thought of you. I thought of no one but you. What happiness to be a district doctor; to help the suffering; to be serving the people! What happiness!” Ekaterina Ivanovna repeated with enthusiasm. “When I thought of you in Moscow, you seemed to me so ideal, so lofty. . . .”

Startsev thought of the notes he used to take out of his pockets in the evening with such pleasure, and the glow in his heart was quenched.

He got up to go into the house. She took his arm.

“You are the best man I’ve known in my life,” she went on. “We will see each other and talk, won’t we? Promise me. I am not a pianist; I am not in error about myself now, and I will not play before you or talk of music.”

When they had gone into the house, and when Startsev saw in the lamplight her face, and her sad, grateful, searching eyes fixed upon him, he felt uneasy and thought again:

“It’s a good thing I did not marry her then.”

He began taking leave.

“You have no human right to go before supper,” said Ivan Petrovitch as he saw him off. “It’s extremely perpendicular on your part. Well, now, perform!” he added, addressing Pava in the hall.

Pava, no longer a boy, but a young man with moustaches, threw himself into an attitude, flung up his arm, and said in a tragic voice:

“Unhappy woman, die!”

All this irritated Startsev. Getting into his carriage, and looking at the dark house and garden which had once been so precious and so dear, he thought of everything at once–Vera Iosifovna’s novels and Kitten’s noisy playing, and Ivan Petrovitch’s jokes and Pava’s tragic posturing, and thought if the most talented people in the town were so futile, what must the town be?

Three days later Pava brought a letter from Ekaterina Ivanovna.

“You don’t come and see us–why?” she wrote to him. “I am afraid that you have changed towards us. I am afraid, and I am terrified at the very thought of it. Reassure me; come and tell me that everything is well.

“I must talk to you.–Your E. I.”

—-

He read this letter, thought a moment, and said to Pava:

“Tell them, my good fellow, that I can’t come to-day; I am very busy. Say I will come in three days or so.”

But three days passed, a week passed; he still did not go. Happening once to drive past the Turkins’ house, he thought he must go in, if only for a moment, but on second thoughts . . . did not go in.

And he never went to the Turkins’ again.

V

Several more years have passed. Startsev has grown stouter still, has grown corpulent, breathes heavily, and already walks with his head thrown back. When stout and red in the face, he drives with his bells and his team of three horses, and Panteleimon, also stout and red in the face with his thick beefy neck, sits on the box, holding his arms stiffly out before him as though they were made of wood, and shouts to those he meets: “Keep to the ri-i-ight!” it is an impressive picture; one might think it was not a mortal, but some heathen deity in his chariot. He has an immense practice in the town, no time to breathe, and already has an estate and two houses in the town, and he is looking out for a third more profitable; and when at the Mutual Credit Bank he is told of a house that is for sale, he goes to the house without ceremony, and, marching through all the rooms, regardless of half-dressed women and children who gaze at him in amazement and alarm, he prods at the doors with his stick, and says: