r, to understand that she
pitied you; you made such a terrible grimace when you walked on the
wounded foot."

"And can it be that seeing her, as you did, at that moment when her soul
was shining in her eyes, you were not in the least affected?"

"No."

I was lying, but I wanted to exasperate him. I have an innate passion
for contradiction--my whole life has been nothing but a series of
melancholy and vain contradictions of heart or reason. The presence of
an enthusiast chills me with a twelfth-night cold, and I believe
that constant association with a person of a flaccid and phlegmatic
temperament would have turned me into an impassioned visionary. I
confess, too, that an unpleasant but familiar sensation was coursing
lightly through my heart at that moment. It was--envy. I say "envy"
boldly, because I am accustomed to acknowledge everything to myself.
It would be hard to find a young man who, if his idle fancy had been
attracted by a pretty woman and he had suddenly found her openly
singling out before his eyes another man equally unknown to her--it
would be hard, I say, to find such a young man (living, of course, in
the great world and accustomed to indulge his self-love) who would not
have been unpleasantly taken aback in such a case.

In silence Grushnitski and I descended the mountain and walked along
the boulevard, past the windows of the house where our beauty had hidden
herself. She was sitting by the window. Grushnitski, plucking me by the
arm, cast upon her one of those gloomily tender glances which have so
little effect upon women. I directed my lorgnette at her, and observed
that she smiled at his glance and that my insolent lorgnette made
her downright angry. And how, indeed, should a Caucasian military man
presume to direct his eyeglass at a princess from Moscow?...

CHAPTER II. 13th May.

THIS morning the doctor came to see me. His name is Werner, but he is
a Russian. What is there surprising in that? I have known a man named
Ivanov, who was a German.

Werner is a remarkable man, and that for many reasons. Like almost all
medical men he is a sceptic and a materialist, but, at the same time, he
is a genuine poet--a poet always in deeds and often in words, although
he has never written two verses in his life. He has mastered all the
living chords of the human heart, just as one learns the veins of a
corpse, but he has never known how to avail himself of his knowledge. In
like manner, it some