these men were, they naturally put Ivan's behavior down
to a sudden turning of the head. One only of them all, and he, had they
but known it, the most deeply hurt, failed to censure, and guessed at
something like the truth: that the young man, suddenly weary of his long
term of unceasing labor at his profession, was seeking temporary
playmates from another sphere.

In this spring of 1868, Ivan was nearly eight-and-twenty years of age.
In knowledge of the gray and ugly sides of life, he was twice as old.
Only in experience of the frivolities of existence was he deficient, his
education there having been cut off in its heyday. It was towards this,
then, towards young companionship and youthful pleasures, that his heart
turned with irresistible longing. His former associates and their dry
discussions and pursuits, the round of petty rivalries, the continual
life of the shop, tortured his nerves. Music itself, his great goddess,
became unworshipful, wearying to his very soul. Thus, repudiating her in
a night, he set forth in all the glory of a cleansed record and a full
pocket, to hunt for pleasure. His Conservatoire classes he changed from
afternoon to morning; and, though he taught abominably, Nicholas kept
the dire red notice from him by doing much of his work over after him,
that he might be free for once to laugh with the spring.

The quarter to which Ivan turned for his recreation would have
surprised his comrades not a little; and young Laroche would curtly have
denied the truth that he had been responsible for his colleague's type
of amusement. Nevertheless it was he who had been responsible for
bringing Irina Petrovna and her brother to Ivan's rooms on the night of
the opera, inspired, rather maliciously, by some faint memory of the old
court-martial proceedings, and the long intrigue deduced by every one
between Ivan and the girl. That night, after Ivan's recovery from his
fainting-fit, Irina's brother, Sergius, had, on request of the young
composer, given Ivan the address in the student quarter where he and his
sister were living. Old Petrov was dead. Irina had freed herself long
ago from her Petersburg connections; and now she was keeping up two
rooms on ten roubles a month, while her brother finished his medical
course at the university.

On the morning after the opera, brother and sister discussed the vague
possibility of Ivan's visiting them. Irina had no difficulty in hiding
from Sergius just how much the