I walked along the railway embankment.

“Silly woman,” I thought, looking at the sky spangled with brilliant stars.  “Even if one admits that omens sometimes tell the truth, what evil can happen to us?  The misfortunes we have endured already, and which are facing us now, are so great that it is difficult to imagine anything worse.  What further harm can you do a fish which has been caught and fried and served up with sauce?”

A poplar covered with hoar frost looked in the bluish darkness like a giant wrapt in a shroud.  It looked at me sullenly and dejectedly, as though like me it realized its loneliness.  I stood a long while looking at it.

“My youth is thrown away for nothing, like a useless cigarette end,” I went on musing.  “My parents died when I was a little child; I was expelled from the high school, I was born of a noble family, but I have received neither education nor breeding, and I have no more knowledge than the humblest mechanic.  I have no refuge, no relations, no friends, no work I like.  I am not fitted for anything, and in the prime of my powers I am good for nothing but to be stuffed into this little station; I have known nothing but trouble and failure all my life.  What can happen worse?”

Red lights came into sight in the distance.  A train was moving towards me.  The slumbering steppe listened to the sound of it.  My thoughts were so bitter that it seemed to me that I was thinking aloud and that the moan of the telegraph wire and the rumble of the train were expressing my thoughts.

“What can happen worse?  The loss of my wife?” I wondered.  “Even that is not terrible.  It’s no good hiding it from my conscience:  I don’t love my wife.  I married her when I was only a wretched boy; now I am young and vigorous, and she has gone off and grown older and sillier, stuffed from her head to her heels with conventional ideas.  What charm is there in her maudlin love, in her hollow chest, in her lusterless eyes?  I put up with her, but I don’t love her.  What can happen?  My youth is being wasted, as the saying is, for a pinch of snuff.  Women flit before my eyes only in the carriage windows, like falling stars.  Love I never had and have not.  My manhood, my courage, my power of feeling are going to ruin....  Everything is being thrown away like dirt, and all my wealth here in the steppe is not worth a farthing.”

The train rushed past me with a roar and indifferently cast the glow of its red lights upon me.  I saw it stop by the green lights of the station, stop for a minute and rumble off again.  After walking a mile and a half I went back.  Melancholy thoughts haunted me still.  Painful as it was to me, yet I remember I tried as it were to make my thoughts still gloomier and more melancholy.  You know people who are vain and not very clever have moments when the consciousness that they are miserable affords them positive satisfaction, and they even coquet with their misery for their own entertainment.  There was a great deal of truth in what I thought, but there was also a great deal that was absurd and conceited, and there was something boyishly defiant in my question:  “What could happen worse?”