She shut her eyes and kissed him passionately on the lips, and for a long while, a full minute, could not take her lips away, though she knew it was unseemly, that he might be thinking the worse of her, that a servant might come in.

“Oh, how you torture me!” she repeated.

When half an hour later, having got all that he wanted, he was sitting at lunch in the dining-room, she was kneeling before him, gazing greedily into his face, and he told her that she was like a little dog waiting for a bit of ham to be thrown to it.  Then he sat her on his knee, and dancing her up and down like a child, hummed: 

“Tara-raboom-dee-ay. . . .  Tara-raboom-dee-ay.”  And when he was getting ready to go she asked him in a passionate whisper: 

“When?  To-day?  Where?” And held out both hands to his mouth as though she wanted to seize his answer in them.

“To-day it will hardly be convenient,” he said after a minute’s thought.  “To-morrow, perhaps.”

And they parted.  Before dinner Sofya Lvovna went to the nunnery to see Olga, but there she was told that Olga was reading the psalter somewhere over the dead.  From the nunnery she went to her father’s and found that he, too, was out.  Then she took another sledge and drove aimlessly about the streets till evening.  And for some reason she kept thinking of the aunt whose eyes were red with crying, and who could find no peace anywhere.

And at night they drove out again with three horses to a restaurant out of town and listened to the gipsies.  And driving back past the nunnery again, Sofya Lvovna thought of Olga, and she felt aghast at the thought that for the girls and women of her class there was no solution but to go on driving about and telling lies, or going into a nunnery to mortify the flesh. . . .  And next day she met her lover, and again Sofya Lvovna drove about the town alone in a hired sledge thinking about her aunt.

A week later Volodya threw her over.  And after that life went on as before, uninteresting, miserable, and sometimes even agonising.  The Colonel and Volodya spent hours playing billiards and picquet, Rita told anecdotes in the same languid, tasteless way, and Sofya Lvovna went about alone in hired sledges and kept begging her husband to take her for a good drive with three horses.

Going almost every day to the nunnery, she wearied Olga, complaining of her unbearable misery, weeping, and feeling as she did so that she brought with her into the cell something impure, pitiful, shabby.  And Olga repeated to her mechanically as though a lesson learnt by rote, that all this was of no consequence, that it would all pass and God would forgive her.

THE TROUSSEAU