out, you vile, loathsome woman!"

"We shall see!" she said, and went out.

It was broad daylight outside, but the doctor still sat at the table
moving the pencil over the paper and writing mechanically.

"My dear Sir. . . . Little foot."

Or he walked about and stopped in the drawing-room before a photograph
taken seven years ago, soon after his marriage, and looked at it
for a long time. It was a family group: his father-in-law, his
mother-in-law, his wife Olga Dmitrievna when she was twenty, and
himself in the role of a happy young husband. His father-in-law, a
clean-shaven, dropsical privy councillor, crafty and avaricious;
his mother-in-law, a stout lady with small predatory features like
a weasel, who loved her daughter to distraction and helped her in
everything; if her daughter were strangling some one, the mother
would not have protested, but would only have screened her with her
skirts. Olga Dmitrievna, too, had small predatory-looking features,
but more expressive and bolder than her mother's; she was not a
weasel, but a beast on a bigger scale! And Nikolay Yevgrafitch
himself in the photograph looked such a guileless soul, such a
kindly, good fellow, so open and simple-hearted; his whole face was
relaxed in the naive, good-natured smile of a divinity student, and
he had had the simplicity to believe that that company of beasts
of prey into which destiny had chanced to thrust him would give him
romance and happiness and all he had dreamed of when as a student
he used to sing the song "Youth is wasted, life is nought, when the
heart is cold and loveless."

And once more he asked himself in perplexity how he, the son of a
village priest, with his democratic bringing up--a plain, blunt,
straightforward man--could have so helplessly surrendered to the
power of this worthless, false, vulgar, petty creature, whose nature
was so utterly alien to him.

When at eleven o'clock he put on his coat to go to the hospital the
servant came into his study.

"What is it?" he asked.

"The mistress has got up and asks you for the twenty-five roubles
you promised her yesterday."

TALENT

AN artist called Yegor Savvitch, who was spending his summer holidays
at the house of an officer's widow, was sitting on his bed, given
up to the depression of morning. It was beginning to look like
autumn out of doors. Heavy, clumsy clouds covered the sky in thick
layers; there was a cold, piercing wind, and with a plaintive wail