to live with him any more, I am
tired of him, his experiments, his lamentations, his weakness, his lack
of humour--tired of him, sick of him. And yet I cannot leave him,
because I am soft, soft without bones, like my country, Ivan
Andreievitch.... My lover is strong. Nothing can change his will. He
will go, will leave me, until he knows that I am free. Then he will
never leave me again.

"Perhaps I will get tired of his strength one day--it may be--just as
now I am tired of Nicholas's weakness. Everything has its end.

"But no! he has humour, and he sees life as it is. I shall be able
always to tell him the truth. With Nicholas it is always lies...."

She suddenly sprang up and stood before me.

"Now, do you think me noble?" she cried.

"Yes," I answered.

"Ah! you are incorrigible! You have drunk Dostoieffsky until you can see
nothing but God and the moujik! But I am alive, Ivan Andreievitch, not a
heroine in a book! Alive, alive, alive! Not one of your Lisas or Annas
or Natashas. I'm alive enough to shoot Uncle Alexei and poison
Nicholas--but I'm soft too, soft so that I cannot bear to see a rabbit
killed... and yet I love Sherry so that I am blind for him and deaf for
him and dead for him--when he is not there. My love--the only one of my
life--the first and the last--"

She flung out her arms:

"Life! Now! Before it is too late! I want it, I want him, I want
happiness!"

She stood thus for a moment, staring out to the sea. Then her arms
dropped, she laughed, fastening her cloak--

"There's your nobility, Ivan Andreievitch--theatrical, all of it. I know
what I am, and I know what I shall do. Nicholas will live to eighty; I
also. I shall hate him, but I shall he in an agony when he cuts his
finger. I shall never see Sherry again. Later, he will marry a fresh
English girl like an apple.... I, because I am weak, soft putty--I have
made it so."

She turned away from me, staring desperately at the wall. When she
looked back to me her face was grey.

She smiled. "What a baby you are!... But take care of yourself. Don't
come on Monday if it's bad weather. Good-bye."

She went.

After a bad, sleepless night, and a morning during which I dozed in a
nightmareish kind of way, I got up early in the afternoon, had some tea,
and about six o'clock started out.

It was a lovely evening; the spring light was in the air, the tufted
trees beside the canal were pink against the pale sky, and thin layers
of ice, lik