like that smile.
'Well,' she repeated, passing her hand over her hair again, 'so be it. He imagines that I shall die of humiliation, and instead of that I am . . . amused by it. There's no need for him to hide.' She walked away from the piano and said, shrugging her shoulders: 'There's no need. . . . It would have been simpler to have it out with me instead of keeping in hiding in other people's flats. I have eyes; I saw it myself long ago. . . . I was only waiting for him to come back to have things out once for all.'
Then she sat down on a low chair by the table, and, leaning her head on the arm of the sofa, wept bitterly. In the drawing-room there was only one candle burning in the candelabra, and the chair where she was sitting was in darkness; but I saw how her head and shoulders were quivering, and how her hair, escaping from her combs, covered her neck, her face, her arms. . . . Her quiet, steady weeping, which was not hysterical but a woman's ordinary weeping, expressed a sense of insult, of wounded pride, of injury, and of something helpless, hopeless, which one could not set right and to which one could not get used. Her tears stirred an echo in my troubled and suffering heart; I forgot my illness and everything else in the world; I walked about the drawing-room and muttered distractedly:
'Is this life? . . . Oh, one can't go on living like this, one can't. . . . Oh, it's madness, wickedness, not life.'
'What humiliation!' she said through her tears. 'To live together, to smile at me at the very time when I was burdensome to him, ridiculous in his eyes! Oh, how humiliating!'
She lifted up her head, and looking at me with tear-stained eyes through her hair, wet with her tears, and pushing it back as it prevented her seeing me, she asked:
'They laughed at me?'
'To these men you were laughable -- you and your love and Turgenev; they said your head was full of him. And if we both die at once in despair, that will amuse them, too; they will make a funny anecdote of it and tell it at your requiem service. But why talk of them?' I said impatiently. 'We must get away from here -- I cannot stay here one minute longer.
She began crying again, while I walked to the piano and sat down.
'What are we waiting for?' I asked dejectedly. 'It's two o'clock.'
'I am not waiting for anything,' she said. 'I am utterly lost.'
'Why do you talk like that? We had better consider together what we are to do. Neither you nor I can stay here. Where do you intend to go?'
Suddenly there was a ring at the bell. My heart stood still. Could it be Orlov, to whom perhaps Kukushkin had complained of me? How should we meet? I went to open the door. It was Polya. She came in shaking the snow off her pelisse, and went into her room without saying a word to me. When I went back to the drawing-room, Zinaida Fyodorovna, pale as death, was standing in the middle of the room, looking towards me with big eyes.
'Who was it?' she asked softly.
'Polya,' I answered.
She passed her hand over her hair and closed her eyes wearily.
'I will go away at once,' she said. 'Will you be kind and take me to the Petersburg Side? What time is it now?'
'A quarter to three.'
XIV
When, a little afterwards, we went out of the house, it was dark and deserted in the street. Wet snow was falling and a damp wind lashed in one's face. I remember it was the beginning of March; a thaw had set in, and for some days past the cabmen had been driving on wheels. Under the impression of the back stairs, of the cold, of the midnight darkness, and the porter in his sheepskin who had questioned us before letting us out of the gate, Zinaida Fyodorovna was utterly cast down and dispirited. When we got into the cab and the hood was put up, trembling all over, she began hurriedly saying how grateful she was to me.
'I do not doubt your good-will, but I am ashamed that you should be troubled,' she muttered. 'Oh, I understand, I understand. . . . When Gruzin was here to-day, I felt that he was lying and concealing something. Well, so be it. But I am ashamed, anyway, that you should be troubled.'
She still had her doubts. To dispel them finally, I asked the cabman to drive through Sergievsky Street; stopping him at Pekarsky's door, I got out of the cab and rang. When the porter came to the door, I asked aloud, that Zinaida Fyodorovna might hear, whether Georgy Ivanitch was at home.
'Yes,' was the answer, 'he came in half an hour ago. He must be in bed by now. What do you want?'
Zinaida Fyodorovna could not refrain from putting her head out.
'Has Georgy Ivanitch been staying here long?' she asked.
'Going on for three weeks.'
'And he's not been away?'
'No,' answered the porter, looking at me with surprise.
'Tell him, early to-morrow,' I said, 'that his sister has arrived from Warsaw. Good-bye.'
Then we drove on. The cab had no apron, the snow fell on us in big flakes, and the wind, especially on the Neva, pierced us through and through. I began to feel as though we had been driving for a long time, that for ages we had been suffering, and that for ages I had been listening to Zinaida Fyodorovna's shuddering breath. In semi- delirium, as though half asleep, I looked back upon my strange, incoherent life, and for some reason recalled a melodrama, 'The Parisian Beggars,' which I had seen once or twice in my childhood. And when to shake off that semi-delirium I peeped out from the hood and saw the dawn, all the images of the past, all my misty thoughts, for some reason, blended in me into one distinct, overpowering thought: everything was irrevocably over for Zinaida Fyodorovna and for me. This was as certain a conviction as though the cold blue sky contained a prophecy, but a minute later I was already thinking of something else and believed differently.
'What am I now?' said Zinaida Fyodorovna, in a voice husky with the cold and the damp. 'Where am I to go?
