I remember helping her to get on the bicycle one evening, and she looked so lovely that I felt as though I were burning my hands when I touched her.  I shuddered with rapture, and when the two of them, my old father and she, both looking so handsome and elegant, bicycled side by side along the main road, a black horse ridden by the steward dashed aside on meeting them, and it seemed to me that it dashed aside because it too was overcome by her beauty.  My love, my worship, touched Ariadne and softened her; she had a passionate longing to be captivated like me and to respond with the same love.  It was so poetical!

But she was incapable of really loving as I did, for she was cold and already somewhat corrupted.  There was a demon in her, whispering to her day and night that she was enchanting, adorable; and, having no definite idea for what object she was created, or for what purpose life had been given her, she never pictured herself in the future except as very wealthy and distinguished, she had visions of balls, races, liveries, of sumptuous drawing-rooms, of a salon of her own, and of a perfect swarm of counts, princes, ambassadors, celebrated painters and artists, all of them adoring her and in ecstasies over her beauty and her dresses. . . .

This thirst for personal success, and this continual concentration of the mind in one direction, makes people cold, and Ariadne was cold—­to me, to nature, and to music.  Meanwhile time was passing, and still there were no ambassadors on the scene.  Ariadne went on living with her brother, the spiritualist:  things went from bad to worse, so that she had nothing to buy hats and dresses with, and had to resort to all sorts of tricks and dodges to conceal her poverty.

As luck would have it, a certain Prince Maktuev, a wealthy man but an utterly insignificant person, had paid his addresses to her when she was living at her aunt’s in Moscow.  She had refused him, point-blank.  But now she was fretted by the worm of repentance that she had refused him; just as a peasant pouts with repulsion at a mug of kvass with cockroaches in it but yet drinks it, so she frowned disdainfully at the recollection of the prince, and yet she would say to me:  “Say what you like, there is something inexplicable, fascinating, in a title. . . .”

She dreamed of a title, of a brilliant position, and at the same time she did not want to let me go.  However one may dream of ambassadors one’s heart is not a stone, and one has wistful feelings for one’s youth.  Ariadne tried to fall in love, made a show of being in love, and even swore that she loved me.  But I am a highly strung and sensitive man; when I am loved I feel it even at a distance, without vows and assurances; at once I felt as it were a coldness in the air, and when she talked to me of love, it seemed to me as though I were listening to the singing of a metal nightingale.  Ariadne was herself aware that she was lacking in something.  She was vexed