was pale and thin in the
face with high cheek-bones, but there was something in the face that
conquered and fascinated! There was something powerful in the ardent
glance of her dark eyes. She always made her appearance "like a
conquering heroine, and to spread her conquests." She seemed proud and
at times even arrogant. I don't know whether she succeeded in being
kind, but I know that she wanted to, and made terrible efforts to force
herself to be a little kind. There were, no doubt, many fine impulses
and the very best elements in her character, but everything in her
seemed perpetually seeking its balance and unable to find it; everything
was in chaos, in agitation, in uneasiness. Perhaps the demands she made
upon herself were too severe, and she was never able to find in herself
the strength to satisfy them.

She sat on the sofa and looked round the room.

"Why do I always begin to feel sad at such moments; explain that
mystery, you learned person? I've been thinking all my life that
I should be goodness knows how pleased at seeing you and recalling
everything, and here I somehow don't feel pleased at all, although I do
love you.... Ach, heavens! He has my portrait on the wall! Give it here.
I remember it! I remember it!"

An exquisite miniature in water-colour of Liza at twelve years old had
been sent nine years before to Stepan Trofimovitch from Petersburg by
the Drozdovs. He had kept it hanging on his wall ever since.

"Was I such a pretty child? Can that really have been my face?"

She stood up, and with the portrait in her hand looked in the
looking-glass.

"Make haste, take it!" she cried, giving back the portrait. "Don't hang
it up now, afterwards. I don't want to look at it."

She sat down on the sofa again. "One life is over and another is begun,
then that one is over--a third begins, and so on, endlessly. All the
ends are snipped off as it were with scissors. See what stale things I'm
telling you. Yet how much truth there is in them!"

She looked at me, smiling; she had glanced at me several times already,
but in his excitement Stepan Trofimovitch forgot that he had promised
to introduce me.

"And why have you hung my portrait under those daggers? And why have you
got so many daggers and sabres?"

He had as a fact hanging on the wall, I don't know why, two crossed
daggers and above them a genuine Circassian sabre. As she asked this
question she looked so directly at me that I wanted to answer, b