ction by one's kind: a mortification, a sickening sense
of helplessness, of rage, of revolt, that belongs to this experience
alone. It is a kind of suffering in which women frequently become
connoisseurs. But its taste is none the less nauseous to the man on whom
Fate forces it.

Michael Gregoriev, then, a furious man of men, was to-day enduring that
which has turned many a woman soul-sick and weary of existence. All the
amazement of unforeseen repulse: the agonized acceptance of an unjust
superiority, a scorn, a pitiless disdain; the totally capricious setting
of one's self apart from one's fellows as something too despicable for
consideration; above all, one's utter powerlessness against this
arbitrary judgment--all these things he felt, and every one of them cut
him to the quick. For Michael Gregoriev's egotism had grown with every
year.

In his black hour he did not fail to indulge in the usual, useless
revilement of the superior class: an act as natural as it is ridiculous.
Was that society that he had sought out and thought to grasp so pure, so
free from corruption, so spotlessly fair, that his, Prince Gregoriev's
peccadilloes must needs bar him from its gatherings? Certainly this
reputation of his was one thing that had kept the door he knocked on
closed. But there were other reasons--innumerable ones, in fact; some of
them adequate, others entirely inconsistent, that Princess Mirski or
Madame Apukhtin might have named. Yet, in the final summing-up, there
would probably have been a traditional indefiniteness about the
wherefore of the Gregoriev ostracism. It was simply understood,
instinctively, throughout Moscow, that no person of that name was
knowable. And this fact, _mirabile dictu_, had, after long cogitation,
been at last borne in upon Michael--man as he was.

Prince Gregoriev, though he was generally looked upon as a parvenu, had
not, like most of that type, been born in the gutter. On the contrary,
there was behind him a long line of recluses, eccentrics, hermits
almost, bearing the strongest resemblance to one another by reason of
their oddities. One special trait, stronger than any other, served to
bind them all together, father and son, through generations. This was
their constant and unconquerable sense of personal isolation: of
loneliness. Crowds of friends and sycophants might surround the
Gregoriev. He was none the less bitterly alone. It was, perhaps, a
morbid perception of individuality, of th