odorovna went on, clasping her hands in despair: "to submit to
authority, congratulate your superiors at the New Year, and then
cards and nothing but cards: worst of all, to be working for a
system which must be distasteful to you--no, _George_, no! You
should not make such horrid jokes. It's dreadful. You are a man of
ideas, and you ought to be working for your ideas and nothing else."

"You really take me for quite a different person from what I am,"
sighed Orlov.

"Say simply that you don't want to talk to me. You dislike me,
that's all," said Zinaida Fyodorovna through her tears.

"Look here, my dear," said Orlov admonishingly, sitting up in his
chair. "You were pleased to observe yourself that I am a clever,
well-read man, and to teach one who knows does nothing but harm. I
know very well all the ideas, great and small, which you mean when
you call me a man of ideas. So if I prefer the service and cards
to those ideas, you may be sure I have good grounds for it. That's
one thing. Secondly, you have, so far as I know, never been in the
service, and can only have drawn your ideas of Government service
from anecdotes and indifferent novels. So it would not be amiss for
us to make a compact, once for all, not to talk of things we know
already or of things about which we are not competent to speak."

"Why do you speak to me like that?" said Zinaida Fyodorovna, stepping
back as though in horror. "What for? _George_, for God's sake, think
what you are saying!"

Her voice quivered and broke; she was evidently trying to restrain
her tears, but she suddenly broke into sobs.

"_George_, my darling, I am perishing!" she said in French, dropping
down before Orlov, and laying her head on his knees. "I am miserable,
I am exhausted. I can't bear it, I can't bear it. . . . In my
childhood my hateful, depraved stepmother, then my husband, now you
. . . you! . . . You meet my mad love with coldness and irony. . . .
And that horrible, insolent servant," she went on, sobbing. "Yes,
yes, I see: I am not your wife nor your friend, but a woman you
don't respect because she has become your mistress. . . . I shall
kill myself!"

I had not expected that her words and her tears would make such an
impression on Orlov. He flushed, moved uneasily in his chair, and
instead of irony, his face wore a look of stupid, schoolboyish
dismay.

"My darling, you misunderstood me," he muttered helplessly, touching
her hair and her shoulders. "For