and more than once I saw her cry.  Another time—­can you imagine it?—­all of a sudden she embraced me and kissed me.  It happened in the evening on the river-bank, and I saw by her eyes that she did not love me, but was embracing me from curiosity, to test herself and to see what came of it.  And I felt dreadful.  I took her hands and said to her in despair:  “These caresses without love cause me suffering!”

“What a queer fellow you are!” she said with annoyance, and walked away.

Another year or two might have passed, and in all probability I should have married her, and so my story would have ended, but fate was pleased to arrange our romance differently.  It happened that a new personage appeared on our horizon.  Ariadne’s brother had a visit from an old university friend called Mihail Ivanitch Lubkov, a charming man of whom coachmen and footmen used to say:  “An entertaining gentleman.”  He was a man of medium height, lean and bald, with a face like a good-natured bourgeois, not interesting, but pale and presentable, with a stiff, well-kept moustache, with a neck like gooseskin, and a big Adam’s apple.  He used to wear pince-nez on a wide black ribbon, lisped, and could not pronounce either r or l.  He was always in good spirits, everything amused him.

He had made an exceedingly foolish marriage at twenty, and had acquired two houses in Moscow as part of his wife’s dowry.  He began doing them up and building a bath-house, and was completely ruined.  Now his wife and four children lodged in Oriental Buildings in great poverty, and he had to support them—­and this amused him.  He was thirty-six and his wife was by now forty-two, and that, too, amused him.  His mother, a conceited, sulky personage, with aristocratic pretensions, despised his wife and lived apart with a perfect menagerie of cats and dogs, and he had to allow her seventy-five roubles a month also; he was, too, a man of taste, liked lunching at the Slavyansky Bazaar and dining at the Hermitage; he needed a great deal of money, but his uncle only allowed him two thousand roubles a year, which was not enough, and for days together he would run about Moscow with his tongue out, as the saying is, looking for some one to borrow from—­and this, too, amused him.  He had come to Kotlovitch to find in the lap of nature, as he said, a rest from family life.  At dinner, at supper, and on our walks, he talked about his wife, about his mother, about his creditors, about the bailiffs, and laughed at them; he laughed at himself and assured us that, thanks to his talent for borrowing, he had made a great number of agreeable acquaintances.  He laughed without ceasing and we laughed too.  Moreover, in his company we spent our time differently.  I was more inclined to quiet, so to say idyllic pleasures; I liked fishing, evening walks, gathering mushrooms; Lubkov preferred picnics, fireworks, hunting.  He used to get up picnics three times a week, and Ariadne, with an earnest and inspired face, used to write a list of oysters, champagne, sweets, and used to send me into Moscow to get them, without inquiring, of course, whether I had money.  And at the picnics there were toasts and laughter, and again mirthful descriptions of how old his wife was, what fat lap-dogs his mother had, and what charming people his creditors were.