“I suppose it’s time for me to go.”

“No, stay a little. . . .  We must have a talk.”

Again they were silent.  He sat down to the piano, struck one chord, then began playing, and sang softly, “What does the coming day bring me?” but as usual he got up suddenly and tossed his head.

“Play something,” Zinaida Fyodorovna asked him.

“What shall I play?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders.  “I have forgotten everything.  I’ve given it up long ago.”

Looking at the ceiling as though trying to remember, he played two pieces of Tchaikovsky with exquisite expression, with such warmth, such insight!  His face was just as usual—­neither stupid nor intelligent—­and it seemed to me a perfect marvel that a man whom I was accustomed to see in the midst of the most degrading, impure surroundings, was capable of such purity, of rising to a feeling so lofty, so far beyond my reach.  Zinaida Fyodorovna’s face glowed, and she walked about the drawing-room in emotion.

“Wait a bit, Godmother; if I can remember it, I will play you something,” he said; “I heard it played on the violoncello.”

Beginning timidly and picking out the notes, and then gathering confidence, he played Saint-Saens’s “Swan Song.”  He played it through, and then played it a second time.

“It’s nice, isn’t it?” he said.

Moved by the music, Zinaida Fyodorovna stood beside him and asked: 

“Tell me honestly, as a friend, what do you think about me?”

“What am I to say?” he said, raising his eyebrows.  “I love you and think nothing but good of you.  But if you wish that I should speak generally about the question that interests you,” he went on, rubbing his sleeve near the elbow and frowning, “then, my dear, you know . . . .  To follow freely the promptings of the heart does not always give good people happiness.  To feel free and at the same time to be happy, it seems to me, one must not conceal from oneself that life is coarse, cruel, and merciless in its conservatism, and one must retaliate with what it deserves—­that is, be as coarse and as merciless in one’s striving for freedom.  That’s what I think.”

“That’s beyond me,” said Zinaida Fyodorovna, with a mournful smile.  “I am exhausted already.  I am so exhausted that I wouldn’t stir a finger for my own salvation.”

“Go into a nunnery.”

He said this in jest, but after he had said it, tears glistened in Zinaida Fyodorovna’s eyes and then in his.

“Well,” he said, “we’ve been sitting and sitting, and now we must go.  Good-bye, dear Godmother.  God give you health.”

He kissed both her hands, and stroking them tenderly, said that he should certainly come to see her again in a day or two.  In the hall, as he was putting on his overcoat, that was so like a child’s pelisse, he fumbled long in his pockets to find a tip for me, but found nothing there.

“Good-bye, my dear fellow,” he said sadly, and went away.