his sledge and was driving away, but turned
suddenly and shouted:

"Dmitri Dmitritch!"

"What?"

"You were right this evening: the sturgeon was a bit too strong!"

These words, so ordinary, for some reason moved Gurov to indignation,
and struck him as degrading and unclean. What savage manners, what
people! What senseless nights, what uninteresting, uneventful days!
The rage for card-playing, the gluttony, the drunkenness, the
continual talk always about the same thing. Useless pursuits and
conversations always about the same things absorb the better part
of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end
there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial,
and there is no escaping or getting away from it--just as though
one were in a madhouse or a prison.

Gurov did not sleep all night, and was filled with indignation. And
he had a headache all next day. And the next night he slept badly;
he sat up in bed, thinking, or paced up and down his room. He was
sick of his children, sick of the bank; he had no desire to go
anywhere or to talk of anything.

In the holidays in December he prepared for a journey, and told his
wife he was going to Petersburg to do something in the interests
of a young friend--and he set off for S----. What for? He did not
very well know himself. He wanted to see Anna Sergeyevna and to
talk with her--to arrange a meeting, if possible.

He reached S---- in the morning, and took the best room at the
hotel, in which the floor was covered with grey army cloth, and on
the table was an inkstand, grey with dust and adorned with a figure
on horseback, with its hat in its hand and its head broken off. The
hotel porter gave him the necessary information; Von Diderits lived
in a house of his own in Old Gontcharny Street--it was not far
from the hotel: he was rich and lived in good style, and had his
own horses; every one in the town knew him. The porter pronounced
the name "Dridirits."

Gurov went without haste to Old Gontcharny Street and found the
house. Just opposite the house stretched a long grey fence adorned
with nails.

"One would run away from a fence like that," thought Gurov, looking
from the fence to the windows of the house and back again.

He considered: to-day was a holiday, and the husband would probably
be at home. And in any case it would be tactless to go into the
house and upset her. If he were to send her a note it might fall
into her husband