about the streets till evening. And for some reason
she kept thinking of the aunt whose eyes were red with crying, and
who could find no peace anywhere.

And at night they drove out again with three horses to a restaurant
out of town and listened to the gipsies. And driving back past the
nunnery again, Sofya Lvovna thought of Olga, and she felt aghast
at the thought that for the girls and women of her class there was
no solution but to go on driving about and telling lies, or going
into a nunnery to mortify the flesh. . . . And next day she met her
lover, and again Sofya Lvovna drove about the town alone in a hired
sledge thinking about her aunt.

A week later Volodya threw her over. And after that life went on
as before, uninteresting, miserable, and sometimes even agonising.
The Colonel and Volodya spent hours playing billiards and picquet,
Rita told anecdotes in the same languid, tasteless way, and Sofya
Lvovna went about alone in hired sledges and kept begging her husband
to take her for a good drive with three horses.

Going almost every day to the nunnery, she wearied Olga, complaining
of her unbearable misery, weeping, and feeling as she did so that
she brought with her into the cell something impure, pitiful, shabby.
And Olga repeated to her mechanically as though a lesson learnt by
rote, that all this was of no consequence, that it would all pass
and God would forgive her.

THE TROUSSEAU

I HAVE seen a great many houses in my time, little and big, new and
old, built of stone and of wood, but of one house I have kept a
very vivid memory. It was, properly speaking, rather a cottage than
a house--a tiny cottage of one story, with three windows, looking
extraordinarily like a little old hunchback woman with a cap on.
Its white stucco walls, its tiled roof, and dilapidated chimney,
were all drowned in a perfect sea of green. The cottage was lost
to sight among the mulberry-trees, acacias, and poplars planted by
the grandfathers and great-grandfathers of its present occupants.
And yet it is a town house. Its wide courtyard stands in a row with
other similar green courtyards, and forms part of a street. Nothing
ever drives down that street, and very few persons are ever seen
walking through it.

The shutters of the little house are always closed; its occupants
do not care for sunlight--the light is no use to them. The windows
are never opened, for they are not fond of fresh air. People who
spend their live