dimir cross on a
ribbon, he was very much pleased with himself, and it seemed as
though the whole world were looking at him with pleasure. Without
turning his head, he looked to each side and thought that the
boulevard was extremely well laid out; that the young cypress-trees,
the eucalyptuses, and the ugly, anemic palm-trees were very handsome
and would in time give abundant shade; that the Circassians were
an honest and hospitable people.

"It's strange that Laevsky does not like the Caucasus," he thought,
"very strange."

Five soldiers, carrying rifles, met him and saluted him. On the
right side of the boulevard the wife of a local official was walking
along the pavement with her son, a schoolboy.

"Good-morning, Marya Konstantinovna," Samoylenko shouted to her
with a pleasant smile. "Have you been to bathe? Ha, ha, ha! . . .
My respects to Nikodim Alexandritch!"

And he went on, still smiling pleasantly, but seeing an assistant
of the military hospital coming towards him, he suddenly frowned,
stopped him, and asked:

"Is there any one in the hospital?"

"No one, Your Excellency."

"Eh?"

"No one, Your Excellency."

"Very well, run along. . . ."

Swaying majestically, he made for the lemonade stall, where sat a
full-bosomed old Jewess, who gave herself out to be a Georgian, and
said to her as loudly as though he were giving the word of command
to a regiment:

"Be so good as to give me some soda-water!"

II

Laevsky's not loving Nadyezhda Fyodorovna showed itself chiefly in
the fact that everything she said or did seemed to him a lie, or
equivalent to a lie, and everything he read against women and love
seemed to him to apply perfectly to himself, to Nadyezhda Fyodorovna
and her husband. When he returned home, she was sitting at the
window, dressed and with her hair done, and with a preoccupied face
was drinking coffee and turning over the leaves of a fat magazine;
and he thought the drinking of coffee was not such a remarkable
event that she need put on a preoccupied expression over it, and
that she had been wasting her time doing her hair in a fashionable
style, as there was no one here to attract and no need to be
attractive. And in the magazine he saw nothing but falsity. He
thought she had dressed and done her hair so as to look handsomer,
and was reading in order to seem clever.

"Will it be all right for me to go to bathe to-day?" she said.

"Why? There won't be an earthquake whether you