e drawing room, pitiful but proud;
beaten-up, but her eyes flaming with an unbearable wrathfulness and a
beauty not human.

Many people, who have happened to see suicides a few hours before their
horrible death, say that in their visages in those fateful hours before
death they have noticed some enigmatic, mysterious, incomprehensible
allurement. And all who saw Jennka on this night, and on the next day
for a few hours, for long, intently and in wonder, kept their gaze upon
her.

And strangest of all (this was one of the sombre wiles of fate) was the
fact that the indirect culprit of her death, the last grain of sand
which draws down the pan of the scales, appeared none other than the
dear, most kind, military cadet Kolya Gladishev.

CHAPTER II.

Kolya Gladishev was a fine, merry, bashful young lad, with a large
head; pink-cheeked, with a funny little white, bent line, as though
from milk, upon his upper lip, under the light down of the moustache,
sprouting through for the first time; with gray, naive eyes, placed far
apart; and so closely cropped, that from underneath his flaxen little
bristles the skin glistened through, just as with a thoroughbred
Yorkshire suckling pig. It was precisely he with whom Jennka during the
past winter had played either at maternal relations, or at dolls; and
thrust upon him a little apple or a couple of bon-bons on his way, when
he would be going away from the house of ill repute, squirming from
shame.

This time, when he came, there could at once be felt in him, after long
living in camps, that rapid change in age, which so often imperceptibly
and rapidly transforms a boy into a youth. He had already finished the
cadet academy and with pride counted himself a junker; although he
still walked around in a cadet's uniform, with aversion. He had grown
taller, had become better formed and more adroit; the camp life had
done him good. He spoke in a bass, and during these months to his most
great pride the nipples of his breast had hardened; the most
important--he already knew about this--and undeniable sign of virile
maturity. Now, in the meanwhile, until the eyes-front severities of a
military school, he had a period of alluring freedom. Already he was
permitted to smoke at home, in the presence of grown-ups; and even his
father had himself presented him with a leather cigar case with his
monogram, and also, in the elevation of family joy, had assigned him
fifteen roubles month