f
everything which connected the man with that background, he began
to feel a broad vacuum between him and it himself.

This timidity, a thing entirely new, entirely unknown to Darvid
from his earliest years, was an oppression which, during the last
days of the hunt, fell on him together with weariness, and some
third thing--a feeling of the difference between himself and
those who surrounded him. Nothing could help him: neither the
iron labor which they praised audibly, nor the millions piled up
by that labor--millions for which they felt unconcealed
reverence. Among those men into whose society he had always
desired to enter as an integral part thereof, on that social
height to which he had been climbing in imagination and with
effort, he felt as if he were in some uneasy chair, put out in a
cold wind, and deprived of every outlook. He found nothing there
on which to rest his eye, or his thought. Emptiness, emptiness,
weariness. A little humiliation which, like a tiny, but venomous
worm, was boring into the bottom of his heart. It was not
wonderful, therefore, that when he thought of how he had used his
time, and of all that he had seen, heard, and passed through,
there was on his lips one of those smiles most bristling with
pins points, while in his mind he repeated the expression:
"Wretchedness!"

He was too wise not to give this name at times to many things of
the world which he desired and toward which he was struggling.

After some days of labor, so intense that it astonished those who
saw it, and which weakened those who assisted in it, he received
at an hour before evening, as customary, in his study, all men
who came either on business, or with visits. He knew no
exceptions for anyone, nor indulgence for himself. He received
all, conversed with all, for it was impossible to foresee what a
given man might contribute, or what he might be good for, if not
at the moment, some time, if not much, then a little. But his
cheeks seemed thinner than usual, and at moments his speech was
less fluent. That hunting trip, and all which he had experienced
at it, and afterward, days of activity and unparalleled exertion,
were reflected on his face in an expression of suffering. And
sometimes even a slight hesitation in speech arose from this,
that his mind ran to a subject which tortured him, and raised in
his breast a lump of slimy serpents. Some hours before he had
inquired of his secretary, who, in spite of youth, zea