, and he did not want to move into Pyatnitsky Street
or to go into the warehouse; but he guessed what his wife was
thinking, and could not oppose her. He stroked her cheek and said:

"I feel as though our life is already over, and that a grey half-life
is beginning for us. When I knew that my brother Fyodor was hopelessly
ill, I shed tears; we spent our childhood and youth together, when
I loved him with my whole soul. And now this catastrophe has come,
and it seems, too, as though, losing him, I am finally cut away
from my past. And when you said just now that we must move into the
house in Pyatnitsky Street, to that prison, it began to seem to me
that there was no future for me either."

He got up and walked to the window.

"However that may be, one has to give up all thoughts of happiness,"
he said, looking out into the street. "There is none. I never have
had any, and I suppose it doesn't exist at all. I was happy once
in my life, though, when I sat at night under your parasol. Do you
remember how you left your parasol at Nina's?" he asked, turning
to his wife. "I was in love with you then, and I remember I spent
all night sitting under your parasol, and was perfectly blissful."

Near the book-case in the study stood a mahogany chest with bronze
fittings where Laptev kept various useless things, including the
parasol. He took it out and handed it to his wife.

"Here it is."

Yulia looked for a minute at the parasol, recognised it, and smiled
mournfully.

"I remember," she said. "When you proposed to me you held it in
your hand." And seeing that he was preparing to go out, she said:
"Please come back early if you can. I am dull without you."

And then she went into her own room, and gazed for a long time at
the parasol.

XVII

In spite of the complexity of the business and the immense turnover,
there were no bookkeepers in the warehouse, and it was impossible
to make anything out of the books kept by the cashier in the office.
Every day the warehouse was visited by agents, German and English,
with whom the clerks talked politics and religion. A man of noble
birth, ruined by drink, an ailing, pitiable creature, used to come
to translate the foreign correspondence in the office; the clerks
used to call him a midge, and put salt in his tea. And altogether
the whole concern struck Laptev as a very queer business.

He went to the warehouse every day and tried to establish a new
order of things; he forbade t