you must believe....  Don’t think me mad.  I am quite sane sitting here in my room writing....  Every one is asleep.  Every one but not everything.  I’ve been queer, now and again, lately... off and on.  Do you know how it comes?  When the inside of the world goes further and further within dragging you after it, until at last you are in the bowels of darkness choking.  I’ve known such moods all my life.  Haven’t you known them?  Lately, of course, I’ve been drinking again.  I tell you, but I wouldn’t own it to most people.  But they all know, I suppose....  Alexei made me start again, but it’s foolish to put everything on to him.  If I weren’t a weak man he wouldn’t be able to do anything with me, would he?  Do you believe in God, and don’t you think that He intended the weak to have some compensation somewhere, because it isn’t their fault that they’re weak, is it!  They can struggle and struggle, but it’s like being in a net.  Well, one must just make a hole in the net large enough to get out of, that’s all.  And now, ever since two days ago, when I resolved to make that hole, I’ve been quite calm.  I’m as calm as anything now writing to you.  Two days ago Vera told me that he was going back to England....  Oh, she was so good to me that day, Ivan Andreievitch.  We sat together all alone in the flat, and she had her hand in mine, just as we used to do in the old days when I pretended to myself that she loved me.  Now I know that she did not, but the warmer and more marvellous was her kindness to me, her goodness, and nobility.  Do you not think, Ivan Andreievitch, that if you go deep enough in every human heart, there is this kernel of goodness, this fidelity to some ideal.  Do you know we have a proverb:  “In each man’s heart there is a secret town at whose altars the true prayers are offered!” Even perhaps with Alexei it is so, only there you must go very deep, and there is no time.

But I must tell you about Vera.  She told me so kindly that he was going to England, and that now her whole life would be led in Nina and myself.  I held her hand very close in mine and asked her, Was it really true that she loved him.  And she said, yes she did, but that that she could not help.  She said that she had spoken with him, and that they had decided that it would be best for him to go away.  Then she begged my forgiveness for many things, because she had been harsh or cross,—­I don’t know what things....  Oh, Ivan Andreievitch, she to beg forgiveness of me!

But I held her hand closer and closer, because I knew that it was the last time that I would be able so truly to hold it.  How could she not see that now everything was over—­everything—­quite everything!  Am I one to hold her, to chain her down, to keep her when she has already escaped?  Is that the way to prove my fidelity to her?

Of course I did not speak to her of this, but for the first time in all our years together, I felt older than her and wiser.  But of course Alexei saw it.  How he heard I do not know, but that same day he came to me and he seemed to be very kind.