ng, her plump, white-skinned
brother, the spiritualist, made his appearance and expressed his
desire to speak to me alone.

He was a man without will; in spite of his education and his delicacy
he could never resist reading another person's letter, if it lay
before him on the table. And now he admitted that he had by chance
read a letter of Lubkov's to Ariadne.

"From that letter I learned that she is very shortly going abroad.
My dear fellow, I am very much upset! Explain it to me for goodness'
sake. I can make nothing of it!"

As he said this he breathed hard, breathing straight in my face and
smelling of boiled beef.

"Excuse me for revealing the secret of this letter to you, but you
are Ariadne's friend, she respects you. Perhaps you know something
of it. She wants to go away, but with whom? Mr. Lubkov is proposing
to go with her. Excuse me, but this is very strange of Mr. Lubkov;
he is a married man, he has children, and yet he is making a
declaration of love; he is writing to Ariadne 'darling.' Excuse me,
but it is so strange!"

I turned cold all over; my hands and feet went numb and I felt an
ache in my chest, as if a three-cornered stone had been driven into
it. Kotlovitch sank helplessly into an easy-chair, and his hands
fell limply at his sides.

"What can I do?" I inquired.

"Persuade her. . . . Impress her mind. . . . Just consider, what
is Lubkov to her? Is he a match for her? Oh, good God! How awful
it is, how awful it is!" he went on, clutching his head. "She has
had such splendid offers--Prince Maktuev and . . . and others.
The prince adores her, and only last Wednesday week his late
grandfather, Ilarion, declared positively that Ariadne would be his
wife--positively! His grandfather Ilarion is dead, but he is a
wonderfully intelligent person; we call up his spirit every day."

After this conversation I lay awake all night and thought of shooting
myself. In the morning I wrote five letters and tore them all up.
Then I sobbed in the barn. Then I took a sum of money from my father
and set off for the Caucasus without saying good-bye.

Of course, a woman's a woman and a man's a man, but can all that
be as simple in our day as it was before the Flood, and can it be
that I, a cultivated man endowed with a complex spiritual organisation,
ought to explain the intense attraction I feel towards a woman
simply by the fact that her bodily formation is different from mine?
Oh, how awful that would be! I