egan crying, she did not know why. Just at that instant Hanov
drove up with his team of four horses, and seeing him she imagined
happiness such as she had never had, and smiled and nodded to him as
an equal and a friend, and it seemed to her that her happiness, her
triumph, was glowing in the sky and on all sides, in the windows and on
the trees. Her father and mother had never died, she had never been a
schoolmistress, it was a long, tedious, strange dream, and now she had
awakened....

"Vassilyevna, get in!"

And at once it all vanished. The barrier was slowly raised. Marya
Vassilyevna, shivering and numb with cold, got into the cart. The
carriage with the four horses crossed the railway line; Semyon followed
it. The signalman took off his cap.

"And here is Vyazovye. Here we are."

A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN

A MEDICAL student called Mayer, and a pupil of the Moscow School of
Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture called Rybnikov, went one evening
to see their friend Vassilyev, a law student, and suggested that he
should go with them to S. Street. For a long time Vassilyev would not
consent to go, but in the end he put on his greatcoat and went with
them.

He knew nothing of fallen women except by hearsay and from books, and
he had never in his life been in the houses in which they live. He
knew that there are immoral women who, under the pressure of fatal
circumstances--environment, bad education, poverty, and so on--are
forced to sell their honor for money. They know nothing of pure love,
have no children, have no civil rights; their mothers and sisters weep
over them as though they were dead, science treats of them as an evil,
men address them with contemptuous familiarity. But in spite of
all that, they do not lose the semblance and image of God. They all
acknowledge their sin and hope for salvation. Of the means that lead to
salvation they can avail themselves to the fullest extent. Society, it
is true, will not forgive people their past, but in the sight of God St.
Mary of Egypt is no lower than the other saints. When it had happened
to Vassilyev in the street to recognize a fallen woman as such, by her
dress or her manners, or to see a picture of one in a comic paper,
he always remembered a story he had once read: a young man, pure and
self-sacrificing, loves a fallen woman and urges her to become his wife;
she, considering herself unworthy of such happiness, takes poison.

Vassilyev lived in one of the