gazing at the long striped rug that stretches the whole length of the corridor, the idea occurs to me that I am playing in the life of this woman a strange, probably false part, and that it is beyond my power to alter that part. I run to my room and fall on my bed, and think and think, and can come to no conclusion; and all that is clear to me is that I want to live, and that the plainer and the colder and the harder her face grows, the nearer she is to me, and the more intensely and painfully I feel our kinship. Never mind “My good sir,” never mind her light careless tone, never mind anything you like, only don’t leave me, my treasure. I am afraid to be alone.

Then I go out into the corridor again, listen in a tremor.…I have no dinner; I don’t notice the approach of evening. At last about eleven I hear the familiar footstep, and at the turn near the stairs Zinaida Fyodorovna comes into sight.

“Are you taking a walk?” she would ask as she passes me. “You had better go out into the air.…Good- night!”

“But shall we not meet again to-day?”

“I think it’s late. But as you like.”

“Tell me, where have you been?” I would ask, following her into the room.

“Where? To Monte Carlo.” She took ten gold coins out of her pocket and said: “Look, my good sir; I have won. That’s at roulette.”

“Nonsense! As though you would gamble.”

“Why not? I am going again to-morrow.”

I imagined her with a sick and morbid face, in her condition, tightly laced, standing near the gaming- table in a crowd of cocottes, of old women in their dotage who swarm round the gold like flies round the honey. I remembered she had gone off to Monte Carlo for some reason in secret from me.

“I don’t believe you,” I said one day. “You wouldn’t go there.”

“Don’t agitate yourself. I can’t lose much.”

“It’s not the question of what you lose,” I said with annoyance. “Has it never occurred to you while you were playing there that the glitter of gold, all these women, young and old, the croupiers, all the surroundings—that it is all a vile, loathsome mockery at the toiler’s labour, at his bloody sweat?”

“If one doesn’t play, what is one to do here?” she asked. “The toiler’s labour and his bloody sweat—all that eloquence you can put off till another time; but now, since you have begun, let me go on. Let me ask you bluntly, what is there for me to do here, and what am I to do?”

“What are you to do?” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “That’s a question that can’t be answered straight off.”

“I beg you to answer me honestly, Vladimir Ivanitch,” she said, and her face looked angry. “Once I have brought myself to ask you this question, I am not going to listen to stock phrases. I am asking you,” she went on, beating her hand on the table, as though marking time, “what ought I to do here? And not only here at Nice, but in general?”

I did not speak, but looked out of window to the sea. My heart was beating terribly.

“Vladimir Ivanitch,” she said softly and breathlessly; it was hard for her to speak—“Vladimir Ivanitch, if you do not believe in the cause yourself, if you no longer think of going back to it, why… why did you drag