“And what is there to happen?” I asked myself.  “I think I have endured everything.  I’ve been ill, I’ve lost money, I get reprimanded by my superiors every day, and I go hungry, and a mad wolf has run into the station yard.  What more is there?  I have been insulted, humiliated,... and I have insulted others in my time.  I have not been a criminal, it is true, but I don’t think I am capable of crime—­I am not afraid of being hauled up for it.”

The two little clouds had moved away from the moon and stood at a little distance, looking as though they were whispering about something which the moon must not know.  A light breeze was racing across the steppe, bringing the faint rumble of the retreating train.

My wife met me at the doorway.  Her eyes were laughing gaily and her whole face was beaming with good-humor.

“There is news for you!” she whispered.  “Make haste, go to your room and put on your new coat; we have a visitor.”

“What visitor?”

“Aunt Natalya Petrovna has just come by the train.”

“What Natalya Petrovna?”

“The wife of my uncle Semyon Fyodoritch.  You don’t know her.  She is a very nice, good woman.”

Probably I frowned, for my wife looked grave and whispered rapidly: 

“Of course it is queer her having come, but don’t be cross, Nikolay, and don’t be hard on her.  She is unhappy, you know; Uncle Semyon Fyodoritch really is ill-natured and tyrannical, it is difficult to live with him.  She says she will only stay three days with us, only till she gets a letter from her brother.”

My wife whispered a great deal more nonsense to me about her despotic uncle; about the weakness of mankind in general and of young wives in particular; about its being our duty to give shelter to all, even great sinners, and so on.  Unable to make head or tail of it, I put on my new coat and went to make acquaintance with my “aunt.”

A little woman with large black eyes was sitting at the table.  My table, the gray walls, my roughly-made sofa, everything to the tiniest grain of dust seemed to have grown younger and more cheerful in the presence of this new, young, beautiful, and dissolute creature, who had a most subtle perfume about her.  And that our visitor was a lady of easy virtue I could see from her smile, from her scent, from the peculiar way in which she glanced and made play with her eyelashes, from the tone in which she talked with my wife—­a respectable woman.  There was no need to tell me she had run away from her husband, that her husband was old and despotic, that she was good-natured and lively; I took it all in at the first glance.  Indeed, it is doubtful whether there is a man in all Europe who cannot spot at the first glance a woman of a certain temperament.

“I did not know I had such a big nephew!” said my aunt, holding out her hand to me and smiling.

“And I did not know I had such a pretty aunt,” I answered.