now he saw falsity even in her illness. Her yellow, sleepy
face, her lustreless eyes, her apathetic expression, and the yawning
that always followed her attacks of fever, and the fact that during
them she lay under a shawl and looked more like a boy than a woman,
and that it was close and stuffy in her room--all this, in his
opinion, destroyed the illusion and was an argument against love
and marriage.

The next dish given him was spinach with hard-boiled eggs, while
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, as an invalid, had jelly and milk. When with
a preoccupied face she touched the jelly with a spoon and then began
languidly eating it, sipping milk, and he heard her swallowing, he
was possessed by such an overwhelming aversion that it made his
head tingle. He recognised that such a feeling would be an insult
even to a dog, but he was angry, not with himself but with Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna, for arousing such a feeling, and he understood why
lovers sometimes murder their mistresses. He would not murder her,
of course, but if he had been on a jury now, he would have acquitted
the murderer.

"Merci, darling," he said after dinner, and kissed Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna on the forehead.

Going back into his study, he spent five minutes in walking to and
fro, looking at his boots; then he sat down on his sofa and muttered:

"Run away, run away! We must define the position and run away!"

He lay down on the sofa and recalled again that Nadyezhda Fyodorovna's
husband had died, perhaps, by his fault.

"To blame a man for loving a woman, or ceasing to love a woman, is
stupid," he persuaded himself, lying down and raising his legs in
order to put on his high boots. "Love and hatred are not under our
control. As for her husband, maybe I was in an indirect way one of
the causes of his death; but again, is it my fault that I fell in
love with his wife and she with me?"

Then he got up, and finding his cap, set off to the lodgings of his
colleague, Sheshkovsky, where the Government clerks met every day
to play _vint_ and drink beer.

"My indecision reminds me of Hamlet," thought Laevsky on the way.
"How truly Shakespeare describes it! Ah, how truly!"

III

For the sake of sociability and from sympathy for the hard plight
of newcomers without families, who, as there was not an hotel in
the town, had nowhere to dine, Dr. Samoylenko kept a sort of table
d'hote. At this time there were only two men who habitually dined
with him: a young zoologist c