e musician; she had good taste in dress, in furniture, in
books, and in her own home she would not have put up with a room
like this, smelling of boots and cheap vodka. She, too, had advanced
ideas, but in her free-thinking one felt the overflow of energy,
the vanity of a young, strong, spirited girl, passionately eager
to be better and more original than others. . . . How had it happened
that she had fallen in love with Vlassitch?

"He is a Quixote, an obstinate fanatic, a maniac," thought Pyotr
Mihalitch, "and she is as soft, yielding, and weak in character as
I am. . . . She and I give in easily, without resistance. She loves
him; but, then, I, too, love him in spite of everything."

Pyotr Mihalitch considered Vlassitch a good, straightforward man,
but narrow and one-sided. In his perturbations and his sufferings,
and in fact in his whole life, he saw no lofty aims, remote or
immediate; he saw nothing but boredom and incapacity for life. His
self-sacrifice and all that Vlassitch himself called heroic actions
or noble impulses seemed to him a useless waste of force, unnecessary
blank shots which consumed a great deal of powder. And Vlassitch's
fanatical belief in the extraordinary loftiness and faultlessness
of his own way of thinking struck him as naive and even morbid; and
the fact that Vlassitch all his life had contrived to mix the trivial
with the exalted, that he had made a stupid marriage and looked
upon it as an act of heroism, and then had affairs with other women
and regarded that as a triumph of some idea or other was simply
incomprehensible.

Nevertheless, Pyotr Mihalitch was fond of Vlassitch; he was conscious
of a sort of power in him, and for some reason he had never had the
heart to contradict him.

Vlassitch sat down quite close to him for a talk in the dark, to
the accompaniment of the rain, and he had cleared his throat as a
prelude to beginning on something lengthy, such as the history of
his marriage. But it was intolerable for Pyotr Mihalitch to listen
to him; he was tormented by the thought that he would see his sister
directly.

"Yes, you've had bad luck," he said gently; "but, excuse me, we've
been wandering from the point. That's not what we are talking about."

"Yes, yes, quite so. Well, let us come back to the point," said
Vlassitch, and he stood up. "I tell you, Petrusha, our conscience
is clear. We are not married, but there is no need for me to prove
to you that our marriage is p