d under it. Here and there the reflection
of the stars and the lights on the bank quivered and trembled. Not
far from us in a gondola, hung with coloured lanterns which were
reflected in the water, there were people singing. The sounds of
guitars, of violins, of mandolins, of men's and women's voices,
were audible in the dark. Zinaida Fyodorovna, pale, with a grave,
almost stern face, was sitting beside me, compressing her lips and
clenching her hands. She was thinking about something; she did not
stir an eyelash, nor hear me. Her face, her attitude, and her fixed,
expressionless gaze, and her incredibly miserable, dreadful, and
icy-cold memories, and around her the gondolas, the lights, the
music, the song with its vigorous passionate cry of "_Jam-mo!
Jam-mo!_"--what contrasts in life! When she sat like that, with
tightly clasped hands, stony, mournful, I used to feel as though
we were both characters in some novel in the old-fashioned style
called "The Ill-fated," "The Abandoned," or something of the sort.
Both of us: she--the ill-fated, the abandoned; and I--the
faithful, devoted friend, the dreamer, and, if you like it, a
superfluous man, a failure capable of nothing but coughing and
dreaming, and perhaps sacrificing myself.

But who and what needed my sacrifices now? And what had I to
sacrifice, indeed?

When we came in in the evening we always drank tea in her room and
talked. We did not shrink from touching on old, unhealed wounds--
on the contrary, for some reason I felt a positive pleasure in
telling her about my life at Orlov's, or referring openly to relations
which I knew and which could not have been concealed from me.

"At moments I hated you," I said to her. "When he was capricious,
condescending, told you lies, I marvelled how it was you did not
see, did not understand, when it was all so clear! You kissed his
hands, you knelt to him, you flattered him. . ."

"When I . . . kissed his hands and knelt to him, I loved him . . ."
she said, blushing crimson.

"Can it have been so difficult to see through him? A fine sphinx!
A sphinx indeed--a _kammer-junker!_ I reproach you for nothing,
God forbid," I went on, feeling I was coarse, that I had not the
tact, the delicacy which are so essential when you have to do with
a fellow-creature's soul; in early days before I knew her I had not
noticed this defect in myself. "But how could you fail to see what
he was," I went on, speaking more softly and more diff