this state of quiet, but stubborn rebellion, which produced a slackness of thought and feelings and an obstinate desire for some new experience.

Maybe it was the revolt of the adventurer, the man accustomed to conspiracies, danger, the unknown. Maybe.

But to put it more simply, the fact was that previously I used to speak to people with words borrowed from books, and deafened by their sound I could not listen to the voice within me. Now I became aware that there lived inside me an unwelcome and unpleasant guest who followed my words closely and watched me with doubt and suspicion. I began to notice what had escaped my attention before, namely, that comrade Sasha, a doctor, specializing in children’s diseases, was a very nice woman. She was small, plump, gay, her trim little figure had been circling about me for almost a year, her shapely legs flitting about in their blue stockings. She was particularly fond of blue: her blouses, ribbons, sunshades, the little boxes about the room, the pictures on the wall—all was blue. Even the whites of her eyes were blue, but the irises very dark, melting away in tender smiles.

She did not have a very sound grasp of politics, fiction formed most of her reading, she was not fond of serious books, in spite of a very fine native intelligence.

In 1906 when the uprising had been squashed and the gendarmes were destroying our organization and sending people to prison by dozens, Sasha astonished me by her calm attitude to the events. She arranged for me to hide in the house of her uncle, an officer, and as she left me there, shaking my hand in good-by, she said:

“Why do you neglect your nails so? And you have some dry soap in your ears.”

I liked that. Afterwards I fell in love with her but kept silent about it. But she soon noticed it and came to my help—it all happened very simply, maybe even somewhat unashamedly. One evening I stopped to have tea with her and all of a sudden she asked me, almost angrily:

“Well, when are you going to make up your mind to tell me that you find me attractive?”

That was all. I had expected something different. It seemed to me that real love, like faith, must be naive. In Sasha’s simplicity I scented no naïveté. I remember that she did not even turn away from me as she undressed, and said boastfully as she stood naked in front of me:

“Don’t you think I look nice?”

And thus we started an “affair,” with immense pleasure but without joy. A business-like love-affair, so to say, and because one “cannot get on without it.”

Comrade Popov—a new figure in the town—kept fussing round Sasha. Clean and well-fed, pink-cheeked and pugnosed, with a red mustache, he peered into people’s eyes with the glance of a devoted dog, stressing his readiness to serve, run and fetch. I was conscious in him of the curiosity of a puppy, rushing around unaware of danger, because of his youth. This curiosity roused courage in him, although he seemed to me to be a coward at heart. He had a talent for telling Jewish anecdotes, could recite a quantity of humorous verse and looked much more like a cabaret-singer or like a swindler, than like a serious revolutionary. There was, however, something charming in him, something brilliant, too. Bright sparks in his words, sharp little needles in his thoughts. I very soon noticed that Popov brought sweets to Sasha too often, bought books for her and, in one word, spent a lot of money in paying court to her. I asked her what she thought about that. She told me that he had a rich brother in Rostov—but this did not allay my apprehensions. Maybe I was slightly jealous, knowing that my wife’s sexual curiosity as regards men was very highly developed. As to myself I was easily suspicious, lacked confidence in people, I lived in the period of “agents provocateurs.” It began to dawn upon me that the gendarmes had grown better informed, since Popov had appeared in the town. I found him out in a very simple way: first in