aised his right arm. "Maupassant!" he said rapturously.
"My dear, read Maupassant! one page of his gives you more than all
the riches of the earth! Every line is a new horizon. The softest,
tenderest impulses of the soul alternate with violent tempestuous
sensations; your soul, as though under the weight of forty thousand
atmospheres, is transformed into the most insignificant little bit
of some great thing of an undefined rosy hue which I fancy, if one
could put it on one's tongue, would yield a pungent, voluptuous
taste. What a fury of transitions, of motives, of melodies! You
rest peacefully on the lilies and the roses, and suddenly a thought
--a terrible, splendid, irresistible thought--swoops down upon
you like a locomotive, and bathes you in hot steam and deafens you
with its whistle. Read Maupassant, dear girl; I insist on it."

Lysevitch waved his arms and paced from corner to corner in violent
excitement.

"Yes, it is inconceivable," he pronounced, as though in despair;
"his last thing overwhelmed me, intoxicated me! But I am afraid you
will not care for it. To be carried away by it you must savour it,
slowly suck the juice from each line, drink it in. . . . You must
drink it in! . . ."

After a long introduction, containing many words such as daemonic
sensuality, a network of the most delicate nerves, simoom, crystal,
and so on, he began at last telling the story of the novel. He did
not tell the story so whimsically, but told it in minute detail,
quoting from memory whole descriptions and conversations; the
characters of the novel fascinated him, and to describe them he
threw himself into attitudes, changed the expression of his face
and voice like a real actor. He laughed with delight at one moment
in a deep bass, and at another, on a high shrill note, clasped his
hands and clutched at his head with an expression which suggested
that it was just going to burst. Anna Akimovna listened enthralled,
though she had already read the novel, and it seemed to her ever
so much finer and more subtle in the lawyer's version than in the
book itself. He drew her attention to various subtleties, and
emphasized the felicitous expressions and the profound thoughts,
but she saw in it, only life, life, life and herself, as though she
had been a character in the novel. Her spirits rose, and she, too,
laughing and clasping her hands, thought that she could not go on
living such a life, that there was no need to have a wretch