‘Oh … I’ve simply come.’

Silence. Suddenly she jumps up impulsively and comes to me.

‘Nikolay Stepanovitch,’ she says, turning pale and pressing her hands on her bosom—‘Nikolay Stepanovitch, I cannot go on living like this! I cannot! For God’s sake, tell me quickly, this minute, what I am to do! Tell me, what am I to do?’

‘What can I tell you?’ I ask in perplexity. ‘I can do nothing.’

‘Tell me, I beseech you,’ she goes on, breathing hard and trembling all over. ‘I swear that I cannot go on living like this. It’s too much for me!’

She sinks on a chair and begins sobbing. She flings her head back, wrings her hands, taps with her feet; her hat falls off and hangs bobbing on its elastic; her hair is ruffled.

‘Help me! help me!’ she implores me. ‘I cannot go on!’

She takes her handkerchief out of her travelling-bag, and with it pulls out several letters, which fall from her lap to the floor. I pick them up, and on one of them I recognize the handwriting of Mihail Fyodorovitch and accidentally read a bit of a word ‘passion at.…’

‘There is nothing I can tell you, Katya,’ I say.

‘Help me!’ she sobs, clutching at my hand and kissing it. ‘You are my father, you know, my only friend! You are clever, educated; you have lived so long; you have been a teacher! Tell me, what am I to do?’

‘Upon my word, Katya, I don’t know.…’

I am utterly at a loss and confused, touched by her sobs, and hardly able to stand.

‘Let us have lunch, Katya,’ I say, with a forced smile. ‘Give over crying.’

And at once I add in a sinking voice:

‘I shall soon be gone, Katya.…’

‘Only one word, only one word!’ she weeps, stretching out her hands to me. ‘What am I to do?’

‘You are a queer girl, really…’ I mutter. ‘I don’t understand it! So sensible, and all at once … crying your eyes out.…’

A silence follows. Katya straightens her hair, puts on her hat, then crumples up the letters and stuffs them in her bag—and all this deliberately, in silence. Her face, her bosom, and her gloves are wet with tears, but her expression now is cold and forbidding. … I look at her, and feel ashamed that I am happier than she. The absence of what my philosophic colleagues call a general idea I have detected in myself only just before death, in the decline of my days, while the soul of this poor girl has known and will know no refuge all her life, all her life!

‘Let us have lunch, Katya,’ I say.

‘No, thank you,’ she answers coldly.

Another minute passes in silence.

‘I don’t like Harkov,’ I say; ‘it’s so grey here—such a grey town.’