hough I expected some one any minute to
call out that it was time for me to go away. I was not sorry to leave
Dubechnia, my sorrow was for my love, for which it seemed that autumn
had already begun. What a tremendous happiness it is to love and to be
loved, and what a horror it is to feel that you are beginning to topple
down from that lofty tower!

Masha returned from town toward evening on the following day. She was
dissatisfied with something, but concealed it and said only: "Why have
the winter windows been put in? It will be stifling." I opened two of
the windows. We did not feel like eating, but we sat down and had
supper.

"Go and wash your hands," she said. "You smell of putty."

She had brought some new illustrated magazines from town and we both
read them after supper. They had supplements with fashion-plates and
patterns. Masha just glanced at them and put them aside to look at them
carefully later on; but one dress, with a wide, bell-shaped skirt and
big sleeves interested her, and for a moment she looked at it seriously
and attentively.

"That's not bad," she said.

"Yes, it would suit you very well," said I. "Very well."

And I admired the dress, only because she liked it, and went on
tenderly:

"A wonderful, lovely dress! Lovely, wonderful, Masha. My dear Masha!"

And tears began to drop on the fashion-plate.

"Wonderful Masha...." I murmured. "Dear, darling Masha...."

She went and lay down and I sat still for an hour and looked at the
illustrations.

"You should not have opened the windows," she called from the bedroom.
"I'm afraid it will be cold. Look how the wind is blowing in!"

I read the miscellany, about the preparation of cheap fish, and the size
of the largest diamond in the world. Then I chanced on the picture of
the dress she had liked and I imagined her at a ball, with a fan, and
bare shoulders, a brilliant, dazzling figure, well up in music and
painting and literature, and how insignificant and brief my share in her
life seemed to be!

Our coming together, our marriage, was only an episode, one of many in
the life of this lively, highly gifted creature. All the best things in
the world, as I have said, were at her service, and she had them for
nothing; even ideas and fashionable intellectual movements served her
pleasure, a diversion in her existence, and I was only the coachman who
drove her from one infatuation to another. Now I was no longer necessary
to her; she would f