me with a roar and indifferently cast the glow
of its red lights upon me. I saw it stop by the green lights of the
station, stop for a minute and rumble off again. After walking a mile
and a half I went back. Melancholy thoughts haunted me still. Painful
as it was to me, yet I remember I tried as it were to make my thoughts
still gloomier and more melancholy. You know people who are vain and not
very clever have moments when the consciousness that they are miserable
affords them positive satisfaction, and they even coquet with their
misery for their own entertainment. There was a great deal of truth
in what I thought, but there was also a great deal that was absurd and
conceited, and there was something boyishly defiant in my question:
"What could happen worse?"

"And what is there to happen?" I asked myself. "I think I have endured
everything. I've been ill, I've lost money, I get reprimanded by my
superiors every day, and I go hungry, and a mad wolf has run into the
station yard. What more is there? I have been insulted, humiliated,...
and I have insulted others in my time. I have not been a criminal,
it is true, but I don't think I am capable of crime--I am not afraid of
being hauled up for it."

The two little clouds had moved away from the moon and stood at a little
distance, looking as though they were whispering about something which
the moon must not know. A light breeze was racing across the steppe,
bringing the faint rumble of the retreating train.

My wife met me at the doorway. Her eyes were laughing gaily and her
whole face was beaming with good-humor.

"There is news for you!" she whispered. "Make haste, go to your room and
put on your new coat; we have a visitor."

"What visitor?"

"Aunt Natalya Petrovna has just come by the train."

"What Natalya Petrovna?"

"The wife of my uncle Semyon Fyodoritch. You don't know her. She is a
very nice, good woman."

Probably I frowned, for my wife looked grave and whispered rapidly:

"Of course it is queer her having come, but don't be cross, Nikolay, and
don't be hard on her. She is unhappy, you know; Uncle Semyon Fyodoritch
really is ill-natured and tyrannical, it is difficult to live with him.
She says she will only stay three days with us, only till she gets a
letter from her brother."

My wife whispered a great deal more nonsense to me about her despotic
uncle; about the weakness of mankind in general and of young wives in
particular; about its being