but complete indifference. All that evening he had seemed to her
spiritless, torpid, uninteresting, and insignificant, and the
_sangfroid_ with which he habitually avoided paying at restaurants
on this occasion revolted her, and she had hardly been able to
resist saying, "If you are poor, you should stay at home." The
Colonel paid for all.

Perhaps because trees, telegraph posts, and drifts of snow kept
flitting past her eyes, all sorts of disconnected ideas came rushing
into her mind. She reflected: the bill at the restaurant had been
a hundred and twenty roubles, and a hundred had gone to the gipsies,
and to-morrow she could fling away a thousand roubles if she liked;
and only two months ago, before her wedding, she had not had three
roubles of her own, and had to ask her father for every trifle.
What a change in her life!

Her thoughts were in a tangle. She recalled, how, when she was a
child of ten, Colonel Yagitch, now her husband, used to make love
to her aunt, and every one in the house said that he had ruined
her. And her aunt had, in fact, often come down to dinner with her
eyes red from crying, and was always going off somewhere; and people
used to say of her that the poor thing could find no peace anywhere.
He had been very handsome in those days, and had an extraordinary
reputation as a lady-killer. So much so that he was known all over
the town, and it was said of him that he paid a round of visits to
his adorers every day like a doctor visiting his patients. And even
now, in spite of his grey hair, his wrinkles, and his spectacles,
his thin face looked handsome, especially in profile.

Sofya Lvovna's father was an army doctor, and had at one time served
in the same regiment with Colonel Yagitch. Volodya's father was an
army doctor too, and he, too, had once been in the same regiment
as her father and Colonel Yagitch. In spite of many amatory adventures,
often very complicated and disturbing, Volodya had done splendidly
at the university, and had taken a very good degree. Now he was
specialising in foreign literature, and was said to be writing a
thesis. He lived with his father, the army doctor, in the barracks,
and had no means of his own, though he was thirty. As children Sofya
and he had lived under the same roof, though in different flats.
He often came to play with her, and they had dancing and French
lessons together. But when he grew up into a graceful, remarkably
handsome young man, she began