odesty, and lighted up everything--the snowdrifts, the
embankment.... It was still.

I walked along the railway embankment.

"Silly woman," I thought, looking at the sky spangled with brilliant
stars. "Even if one admits that omens sometimes tell the truth, what
evil can happen to us? The misfortunes we have endured already, and
which are facing us now, are so great that it is difficult to imagine
anything worse. What further harm can you do a fish which has been
caught and fried and served up with sauce?"

A poplar covered with hoar frost looked in the bluish darkness like a
giant wrapt in a shroud. It looked at me sullenly and dejectedly, as
though like me it realized its loneliness. I stood a long while looking
at it.

"My youth is thrown away for nothing, like a useless cigarette end,"
I went on musing. "My parents died when I was a little child; I was
expelled from the high school, I was born of a noble family, but I have
received neither education nor breeding, and I have no more knowledge
than the humblest mechanic. I have no refuge, no relations, no friends,
no work I like. I am not fitted for anything, and in the prime of my
powers I am good for nothing but to be stuffed into this little station;
I have known nothing but trouble and failure all my life. What can
happen worse?"

Red lights came into sight in the distance. A train was moving towards
me. The slumbering steppe listened to the sound of it. My thoughts were
so bitter that it seemed to me that I was thinking aloud and that the
moan of the telegraph wire and the rumble of the train were expressing
my thoughts.

"What can happen worse? The loss of my wife?" I wondered. "Even that is
not terrible. It's no good hiding it from my conscience: I don't love my
wife. I married her when I was only a wretched boy; now I am young and
vigorous, and she has gone off and grown older and sillier, stuffed from
her head to her heels with conventional ideas. What charm is there in
her maudlin love, in her hollow chest, in her lusterless eyes? I put
up with her, but I don't love her. What can happen? My youth is being
wasted, as the saying is, for a pinch of snuff. Women flit before my
eyes only in the carriage windows, like falling stars. Love I never had
and have not. My manhood, my courage, my power of feeling are going to
ruin.... Everything is being thrown away like dirt, and all my wealth
here in the steppe is not worth a farthing."

The train rushed past