me from curiosity, to
test herself and to see what came of it. And I felt dreadful. I
took her hands and said to her in despair: "These caresses without
love cause me suffering!"

"What a queer fellow you are!" she said with annoyance, and walked
away.

Another year or two might have passed, and in all probability I
should have married her, and so my story would have ended, but fate
was pleased to arrange our romance differently. It happened that a
new personage appeared on our horizon. Ariadne's brother had a visit
from an old university friend called Mihail Ivanitch Lubkov, a
charming man of whom coachmen and footmen used to say: "An entertaining
gentleman." He was a man of medium height, lean and bald, with a
face like a good-natured bourgeois, not interesting, but pale and
presentable, with a stiff, well-kept moustache, with a neck like
gooseskin, and a big Adam's apple. He used to wear pince-nez on a
wide black ribbon, lisped, and could not pronounce either _r_ or
_l_. He was always in good spirits, everything amused him.

He had made an exceedingly foolish marriage at twenty, and had
acquired two houses in Moscow as part of his wife's dowry. He began
doing them up and building a bath-house, and was completely ruined.
Now his wife and four children lodged in Oriental Buildings in great
poverty, and he had to support them--and this amused him. He was
thirty-six and his wife was by now forty-two, and that, too, amused
him. His mother, a conceited, sulky personage, with aristocratic
pretensions, despised his wife and lived apart with a perfect
menagerie of cats and dogs, and he had to allow her seventy-five
roubles a month also; he was, too, a man of taste, liked lunching
at the Slavyansky Bazaar and dining at the Hermitage; he needed a
great deal of money, but his uncle only allowed him two thousand
roubles a year, which was not enough, and for days together he would
run about Moscow with his tongue out, as the saying is, looking for
some one to borrow from--and this, too, amused him. He had come
to Kotlovitch to find in the lap of nature, as he said, a rest from
family life. At dinner, at supper, and on our walks, he talked about
his wife, about his mother, about his creditors, about the bailiffs,
and laughed at them; he laughed at himself and assured us that,
thanks to his talent for borrowing, he had made a great number of
agreeable acquaintances. He laughed without ceasing and we laughed
too. Moreover, in hi