am living here in uncertainty, while my
wife is vegetating at her father's and is missing me. And I must
confess my brain is melting with the heat."

"That's all nonsense," said the zoologist. "You can get used to the
heat, and you can get used to being without the deaconess. You
mustn't be slack; you must pull yourself together."

V

Nadyezhda Fyodorovna went to bathe in the morning, and her cook,
Olga, followed her with a jug, a copper basin, towels, and a sponge.
In the bay stood two unknown steamers with dirty white funnels,
obviously foreign cargo vessels. Some men dressed in white and
wearing white shoes were walking along the harbour, shouting loudly
in French, and were answered from the steamers. The bells were
ringing briskly in the little church of the town.

"To-day is Sunday!" Nadyezhda Fyodorovna remembered with pleasure.

She felt perfectly well, and was in a gay holiday humour. In a new
loose-fitting dress of coarse thick tussore silk, and a big
wide-brimmed straw hat which was bent down over her ears, so that
her face looked out as though from a basket, she fancied she looked
very charming. She thought that in the whole town there was only
one young, pretty, intellectual woman, and that was herself, and
that she was the only one who knew how to dress herself cheaply,
elegantly, and with taste. That dress, for example, cost only
twenty-two roubles, and yet how charming it was! In the whole town
she was the only one who could be attractive, while there were
numbers of men, so they must all, whether they would or not, be
envious of Laevsky.

She was glad that of late Laevsky had been cold to her, reserved
and polite, and at times even harsh and rude; in the past she had
met all his outbursts, all his contemptuous, cold or strange
incomprehensible glances, with tears, reproaches, and threats to
leave him or to starve herself to death; now she only blushed,
looked guiltily at him, and was glad he was not affectionate to
her. If he had abused her, threatened her, it would have been better
and pleasanter, since she felt hopelessly guilty towards him. She
felt she was to blame, in the first place, for not sympathising
with the dreams of a life of hard work, for the sake of which he
had given up Petersburg and had come here to the Caucasus, and she
was convinced that he had been angry with her of late for precisely
that. When she was travelling to the Caucasus, it seemed that she
would find here on the f