it seemed as though he still had from those old embraces
the feeling of lace and silk upon his hands and face--and nothing
more. Nothing more--that is, not counting hysterics, shrieks,
reproaches, threats, and lies--brazen, treacherous lies. He
remembered how in his father's house in the village a bird would
sometimes chance to fly in from the open air into the house and
would struggle desperately against the window-panes and upset things;
so this woman from a class utterly alien to him had flown into his
life and made complete havoc of it. The best years of his life had
been spent as though in hell, his hopes for happiness shattered and
turned into a mockery, his health gone, his rooms as vulgar in their
atmosphere as a cocotte's, and of the ten thousand he earned every
year he could never save ten roubles to send his old mother in the
village, and his debts were already about fifteen thousand. It
seemed that if a band of brigands had been living in his rooms his
life would not have been so hopelessly, so irremediably ruined as
by the presence of this woman.

He began coughing and gasping for breath. He ought to have gone to
bed and got warm, but he could not. He kept walking about the rooms,
or sat down to the table, nervously fidgeting with a pencil and
scribbling mechanically on a paper.

"Trying a pen. . . . A little foot."

By five o'clock he grew weaker and threw all the blame on himself.
It seemed to him now that if Olga Dmitrievna had married some one
else who might have had a good influence over her--who knows?--
she might after all have become a good, straightforward woman. He
was a poor psychologist, and knew nothing of the female heart;
besides, he was churlish, uninteresting. . . .

"I haven't long to live now," he thought. "I am a dead man, and
ought not to stand in the way of the living. It would be strange
and stupid to insist upon one's rights now. I'll have it out with
her; let her go to the man she loves. . . . I'll give her a divorce.
I'll take the blame on myself."

Olga Dmitrievna came in at last, and she walked into the study and
sank into a chair just as she was in her white cloak, hat, and
overboots.

"The nasty, fat boy," she said with a sob, breathing hard. "It's
really dishonest; it's disgusting." She stamped. "I can't put up
with it; I can't, I can't!"

"What's the matter?" asked Nikolay Yevgrafitch, going up to her.

"That student, Azarbekov, was seeing me home, and he lost my b