a, real Russia. The passengers in the train would talk
about trade, new singers, the Franco-Russian _entente_; on all sides
there would be the feeling of keen, cultured, intellectual, eager
life. . . . Hasten on, on! At last Nevsky Prospect, and Great
Morskaya Street, and then Kovensky Place, where he used to live at
one time when he was a student, the dear grey sky, the drizzling
rain, the drenched cabmen. . . .

"Ivan Andreitch!" some one called from the next room. "Are you at
home?"

"I'm here," Laevsky responded. "What do you want?"

"Papers."

Laevsky got up languidly, feeling giddy, walked into the other room,
yawning and shuffling with his slippers. There, at the open window
that looked into the street, stood one of his young fellow-clerks,
laying out some government documents on the window-sill.

"One minute, my dear fellow," Laevsky said softly, and he went to
look for the ink; returning to the window, he signed the papers
without looking at them, and said: "It's hot!"

"Yes. Are you coming to-day?"

"I don't think so. . . . I'm not quite well. Tell Sheshkovsky that
I will come and see him after dinner."

The clerk went away. Laevsky lay down on his sofa again and began
thinking:

"And so I must weigh all the circumstances and reflect on them.
Before I go away from here I ought to pay up my debts. I owe about
two thousand roubles. I have no money. . . . Of course, that's not
important; I shall pay part now, somehow, and I shall send the rest,
later, from Petersburg. The chief point is Nadyezhda Fyodorovna. . . .
First of all we must define our relations. . . . Yes."

A little later he was considering whether it would not be better
to go to Samoylenko for advice.

"I might go," he thought, "but what use would there be in it? I
shall only say something inappropriate about boudoirs, about women,
about what is honest or dishonest. What's the use of talking about
what is honest or dishonest, if I must make haste to save my life,
if I am suffocating in this cursed slavery and am killing myself?
. . . One must realise at last that to go on leading the life I do
is something so base and so cruel that everything else seems petty
and trivial beside it. To run away," he muttered, sitting down, "to
run away."

The deserted seashore, the insatiable heat, and the monotony of the
smoky lilac mountains, ever the same and silent, everlastingly
solitary, overwhelmed him with depression, and, as it were, made
hi