: "If you don't leave
off boring me with your sermons, I'll undress this minute and lie
naked here on these flowers."

Often looking at her asleep, or eating, or trying to assume a naive
expression, I wondered why that extraordinary beauty, grace, and
intelligence had been given her by God. Could it simply be for
lolling in bed, eating and lying, lying endlessly? And was she
intelligent really? She was afraid of three candles in a row, of
the number thirteen, was terrified of spells and bad dreams. She
argued about free love and freedom in general like a bigoted old
woman, declared that Boleslav Markevitch was a better writer than
Turgenev. But she was diabolically cunning and sharp, and knew how
to seem a highly educated, advanced person in company.

Even at a good-humoured moment, she could always insult a servant
or kill an insect without a pang; she liked bull-fights, liked to
read about murders, and was angry when prisoners were acquitted.

For the life Ariadne and I were leading, we had to have a great
deal of money. My poor father sent me his pension, all the little
sums he received, borrowed for me wherever he could, and when one
day he answered me: "Non habeo," I sent him a desperate telegram
in which I besought him to mortgage the estate. A little later I
begged him to get money somehow on a second mortgage. He did this
too without a murmur and sent me every farthing. Ariadne despised
the practical side of life; all this was no concern of hers, and
when flinging away thousands of francs to satisfy her mad desires
I groaned like an old tree, she would be singing "Addio bella Napoli"
with a light heart.

Little by little I grew cold to her and began to be ashamed of our
tie. I am not fond of pregnancy and confinements, but now I sometimes
dreamed of a child who would have been at least a formal justification
of our life. That I might not be completely disgusted with myself,
I began reading and visiting museums and galleries, gave up drinking
and took to eating very little. If one keeps oneself well in hand
from morning to night, one's heart seems lighter. I began to bore
Ariadne too. The people with whom she won her triumphs were, by the
way, all of the middling sort; as before, there were no ambassadors,
there was no salon, the money did not run to it, and this mortified
her and made her sob, and she announced to me at last that perhaps
she would not be against our returning to Russia.

And here we are o