thing.  She never liked Grogoff, never trusted him, and had a very clear idea of his character.  But more awful to her than his weakness was her knowledge that Nina did not love him.  What could have driven her to do such a thing?  She knew of her affection for Lawrence, but she had, perhaps, never taken that seriously.  How could Nina really love Lawrence when he, so obviously, cared nothing at all for her?  She reasoned then, as every one always does, on the lines of her own character.  She herself could never have cared seriously for any one had there been no return.  Her pride would not have allowed her....

But Nina had been the charge of her life.  Before Nicholas, before her own life, before everything.  Nina was her duty, her sacred cause—­and now she was betraying her trust!  Something must be done—­but what? but what?  She knew Nina well enough to realise that a false step would only plunge her farther than ever into the business.  It must have seemed to her indeed that because of her own initial disloyalty the whole world was falling away from her.

Then there came Semyonov; I did not at this time at all sufficiently realise that her hatred of her uncle—­for it was hatred, more, much more than mere dislike—­had been with her all her life.  Many months afterwards she told me that she could never remember a time when she had not hated him.  He had teased her when she was a very little girl, laughing at her naive honesty, throwing doubts on her independence, cynically ridiculing her loyalty.  There had been one horrible winter month (then ten or eleven years of age) when she had been sent to stay with him in Moscow.

He had a fine house near the Arbat, and he was living (although she did not of course know anything about that at the time) with one of his gaudiest mistresses.  Her mother and father being dead she had no protection.  She was defenceless.  I don’t think that he in any way perverted her innocence.  I except that he was especially careful to shield her from his own manner of life (he had always his own queer tradition of honour which he effected indeed to despise), but she felt more than she perceived.  The house was garish, over-scented and over-lighted.  There were many gilt chairs and large pictures of naked women and numbers of coloured cushions.  She was desperately lonely.  She hated the woman of the house, who tried, I have no doubt, to be kind to her, and after the first week she was left to herself.

One night, long after she had gone to bed there was a row downstairs, one of the scenes common enough between Semyonov and his women.  Terrified, she went to the head of the stairs and heard the smash of falling glass and her uncle’s voice raised in a scream of rage and vituperation.  A great naked woman in a gold frame swung and leered at her in the lighted passage.  She fled back to her dark room and lay, for the rest of that night, trembling and quivering with her head beneath the bed-clothes.