queer, strained expression,
as though her mouth were full of water; apparently she had meant
to go on further, but she suddenly burst out laughing and sobbing,
and the wineglass crashed on the floor. We took her by the arms and
led her away.

"'Nobody can understand!' she muttered afterwards, lying on the
old nurse's bed in a back room. 'Nobody, nobody! My God, nobody can
understand!'

"But every one understood very well that she was four years older
than her sister Masha, and still unmarried, and that she was crying,
not from envy, but from the melancholy consciousness that her time
was passing, and perhaps had passed. When they danced the quadrille,
she was back in the drawing-room with a tear-stained and heavily
powdered face, and I saw Captain Polyansky holding a plate of ice
before her while she ate it with a spoon.

"It is past five o'clock in the morning. I took up my diary to
describe my complete and perfect happiness, and thought I would
write a good six pages, and read it tomorrow to Masha; but, strange
to say, everything is muddled in my head and as misty as a dream,
and I can remember vividly nothing but that episode with Varya, and
I want to write, 'Poor Varya!' I could go on sitting here and writing
'Poor Varya!' By the way, the trees have begun rustling; it will
rain. The crows are cawing, and my Masha, who has just gone to
sleep, has for some reason a sorrowful face."

For a long while afterwards Nikitin did not write his diary. At the
beginning of August he had the school examinations, and after the
fifteenth the classes began. As a rule he set off for school before
nine in the morning, and before ten o'clock he was looking at his
watch and pining for his Masha and his new house. In the lower forms
he would set some boy to dictate, and while the boys were writing,
would sit in the window with his eyes shut, dreaming; whether he
dreamed of the future or recalled the past, everything seemed to
him equally delightful, like a fairy tale. In the senior classes
they were reading aloud Gogol or Pushkin's prose works, and that
made him sleepy; people, trees, fields, horses, rose before his
imagination, and he would say with a sigh, as though fascinated by
the author:

"How lovely!"

At the midday recess Masha used to send him lunch in a snow-white
napkin, and he would eat it slowly, with pauses, to prolong the
enjoyment of it; and Ippolit Ippolititch, whose lunch as a rule
consisted of nothing but bre