he days of youth. The old lime-trees and birches, white with
hoarfrost, have a kindly expression; they are nearer to the heart than
cypresses and palm-trees, and with the dear familiar trees there is no
need to think of mountains and the sea.

Gomov was a native of Moscow. He returned to Moscow on a fine frosty
day, and when he donned his fur coat and warm gloves, and took a stroll
through Petrovka, and when on Saturday evening he heard the church-bells
ringing, then his recent travels and the places he had visited lost all
their charm. Little by little he sank back into Moscow life, read
eagerly three newspapers a day, and said that he did not read Moscow
papers as a matter of principle. He was drawn into a round of
restaurants, clubs, dinner-parties, parties, and he was flattered to
have his house frequented by famous lawyers and actors, and to play
cards with a professor at the University club. He could eat a whole
plateful of hot _sielianka_.

So a month would pass, and Anna Sergueyevna, he thought, would be lost
in the mists of memory and only rarely would she visit his dreams with
her touching smile, just as other women had done. But more than a month
passed, full winter came, and in his memory everything was clear, as
though he had parted from Anna Sergueyevna only yesterday. And his
memory was lit by a light that grew ever stronger. No matter how,
through the voices of his children saying their lessons, penetrating to
the evening stillness of his study, through hearing a song, or the music
in a restaurant, or the snow-storm howling in the chimney, suddenly the
whole thing would come to life again in his memory: the meeting on the
jetty, the early morning with the mists on the mountains, the steamer
from Feodossia and their kisses. He would pace up and down his room and
remember it all and smile, and then his memories would drift into
dreams, and the past was confused in his imagination with the future. He
did not dream at night of Anna Sergueyevna, but she followed him
everywhere, like a shadow, watching him. As he shut his eyes, he could
see her, vividly, and she seemed handsomer, tenderer, younger than in
reality; and he seemed to himself better than he had been at Talta. In
the evenings she would look at him from the bookcase, from the
fireplace, from the corner; he could hear her breathing and the soft
rustle of her dress. In the street he would gaze at women's faces to see
if there were not one like her...