kes her run away to Italy with a bourgeois who had "a neck
like goose-skin and a big Adam's apple," and who, as he talked,
"breathed hard, breathing straight in my face and smelling of boiled
beef." As the more sensitive lover who supplanted the bourgeois looks
back, her incessant gluttony is more vivid in his thoughts than her
charm:

She would sleep every day till two or three o'clock; she had her
coffee and lunch in bed. At dinner she would eat soup, lobster,
fish, meat, asparagus, game, and after she had gone to bed I used
to bring up something, for instance, roast beef, and she would eat
it with a melancholy, careworn expression, and if she waked in the
night she would eat apples or oranges.

The story, it is only fair to say, is given in the words of a lover
dissatisfied with lust, and the judgment may therefore be regarded as
the lover's rather than as Tchehov's. Tchehov sets down the judgment,
however, in a mood of acute perceptiveness of everything that is jarring
and vulgar in sexual vanity. Ariadne's desire to please is never
permitted to please us as, say, Beatrix Esmond's is. Her will to
fascinate does not fascinate when it is refracted in Tchehov's critical
mind:

She waked up every morning with the one thought of "pleasing." It
was the aim and object of her life. If I told her that in such a
house, in such a street, there lived a man who was not attracted by
her, it would have caused her real suffering. She wanted every day
to enchant, to captivate, to drive men crazy. The fact that I was
in her power and reduced to a complete nonentity before her charms
gave her the same sort of satisfaction that victors used to get in
tournaments.... She had an extraordinary opinion of her own charms;
she imagined that if somewhere, in some great assembly, men could
have seen how beautifully she was made and the colour of her skin,
she would have vanquished all Italy, the whole world. Her talk of
her figure, of her skin, offended me, and observing this, she
would, when she was angry, say all sorts of vulgar things taunting
me.

A few strokes of cruelty are added to the portrait:

Even at a good-humoured moment, she could always insult a servant
or kill an insect without a pang; she liked bull-fights, liked to
read about murders, and was angry when prisoners were acquitted.

As one reads _Ariadne_, on