Laptev was afraid to go home with her, foreseeing an unpleasant discussion, cutting words, and tears, and he suggested that they should go and have tea at a restaurant.  But she said: 

“No, no.  I want to go home.  Don’t dare to talk to me of restaurants.”

She did not like being in a restaurant, because the atmosphere of restaurants seemed to her poisoned by tobacco smoke and the breath of men.  Against all men she did not know she cherished a strange prejudice, regarding them all as immoral rakes, capable of attacking her at any moment.  Besides, the music played at restaurants jarred on her nerves and gave her a headache.

Coming out of the Hall of Nobility, they took a sledge in Ostozhenka and drove to Savelovsky Lane, where she lodged.  All the way Laptev thought about her.  It was true that he owed her a great deal.  He had made her acquaintance at the flat of his friend Yartsev, to whom she was giving lessons in harmony.  Her love for him was deep and perfectly disinterested, and her relations with him did not alter her habits; she went on giving her lessons and wearing herself out with work as before.  Through her he came to understand and love music, which he had scarcely cared for till then.

“Half my kingdom for a cup of tea!” she pronounced in a hollow voice, covering her mouth with her muff that she might not catch cold.  “I’ve given five lessons, confound them!  My pupils are as stupid as posts; I nearly died of exasperation.  I don’t know how long this slavery can go on.  I’m worn out.  As soon as I can scrape together three hundred roubles, I shall throw it all up and go to the Crimea, to lie on the beach and drink in ozone.  How I love the sea—­oh, how I love the sea!”

“You’ll never go,” said Laptev.  “To begin with, you’ll never save the money; and, besides, you’d grudge spending it.  Forgive me, I repeat again:  surely it’s quite as humiliating to collect the money by farthings from idle people who have music lessons to while away their time, as to borrow it from your friends.”

“I haven’t any friends,” she said irritably.  “And please don’t talk nonsense.  The working class to which I belong has one privilege:  the consciousness of being incorruptible—­the right to refuse to be indebted to wretched little shopkeepers, and to treat them with scorn.  No, indeed, you don’t buy me!  I’m not a Yulitchka!”

Laptev did not attempt to pay the driver, knowing that it would call forth a perfect torrent of words, such as he had often heard before.  She paid herself.

She had a little furnished room in the flat of a solitary lady who provided her meals.  Her big Becker piano was for the time at Yartsev’s in Great Nikitsky Street, and she went there every day to play on it.  In her room there were armchairs in loose covers, a bed with a white summer quilt, and flowers belonging to the landlady; there were oleographs on the walls, and there was nothing that would have suggested that there was a woman, and a woman of university education, living in it.  There was no toilet table; there were no books; there was not even a writing-table.  It was evident that she went to bed as soon as she got home, and went out as soon as she got up in the morning.