She saw her children:  the everlasting apprehension of colds, scarlet fever, diphtheria, bad marks at school, separation.  Out of a brood of five or six one was sure to die.

The grey background was not untouched by death.  That might well be.  A husband and wife cannot die simultaneously.  Whatever happened one must bury the other.  And Nellie saw her husband dying.  This terrible event presented itself to her in every detail.  She saw the coffin, the candles, the deacon, and even the footmarks in the hall made by the undertaker.

“Why is it, what is it for?” she asked, looking blankly at her husband’s face.

And all the previous life with her husband seemed to her a stupid prelude to this.

Something fell from Nellie’s hand and knocked on the floor.  She started, jumped up, and opened her eyes wide.  One looking-glass she saw lying at her feet.  The other was standing as before on the table.

She looked into the looking-glass and saw a pale, tear-stained face.  There was no grey background now.

“I must have fallen asleep,” she thought with a sigh of relief.

OLD AGE

Uzelkov, an architect with the rank of civil councillor, arrived in his native town, to which he had been invited to restore the church in the cemetery.  He had been born in the town, had been at school, had grown up and married in it.  But when he got out of the train he scarcely recognized it.  Everything was changed. . . .  Eighteen years ago when he had moved to Petersburg the street-boys used to catch marmots, for instance, on the spot where now the station was standing; now when one drove into the chief street, a hotel of four storeys stood facing one; in old days there was an ugly grey fence just there; but nothing—­neither fences nor houses —­had changed as much as the people.  From his enquiries of the hotel waiter Uzelkov learned that more than half of the people he remembered were dead, reduced to poverty, forgotten.

“And do you remember Uzelkov?” he asked the old waiter about himself.  “Uzelkov the architect who divorced his wife?  He used to have a house in Svirebeyevsky Street . . . you must remember.”

“I don’t remember, sir.”

“How is it you don’t remember?  The case made a lot of noise, even the cabmen all knew about it.  Think, now!  Shapkin the attorney managed my divorce for me, the rascal . . . the notorious cardsharper, the fellow who got a thrashing at the club. . . .”

“Ivan Nikolaitch?”

“Yes, yes. . . .  Well, is he alive?  Is he dead?”

“Alive, sir, thank God.  He is a notary now and has an office.  He is very well off.  He has two houses in Kirpitchny Street. . . .  His daughter was married the other day.”

Uzelkov paced up and down the room, thought a bit, and in his boredom made up his mind to go and see Shapkin at his office.  When he walked out of the hotel and sauntered slowly towards Kirpitchny Street it was midday.  He found Shapkin at his office and scarcely recognized him.  From the once well-made, adroit attorney with a mobile, insolent, and always drunken face Shapkin had changed into a modest, grey-headed, decrepit old man.