It was only now that the memory of all those terrible nights came vividly back to her, especially one during the carnival when she was expecting a student who had promised to buy her out.  She remembered how she—­wearing her low necked silk dress stained with wine, a red bow in her untidy hair, wearied, weak, half tipsy, having seen her visitors off, sat down during an interval in the dancing by the piano beside the bony pianiste with the blotchy face, who played the accompaniments to the violin, and began complaining of her hard fate; and how this pianiste said that she, too, was feeling how heavy her position was and would like to change it; and how Clara suddenly came up to them; and how they all three decided to change their life.  They thought that the night was over, and were about to go away, when suddenly the noise of tipsy voices was herd in the ante-room.  The violinist played a tune and the pianiste began hammering the first figure of a quadrille on the piano, to the tune of a most merry Russian song.  A small, perspiring man, smelling of spirits, with a white tie and swallow-tail coat, which he took off after the first figure, came up to her, hiccoughing, and caught her up, while another fat man, with a beard, and also wearing a dress-coat (they had come straight from a ball) caught Clara up, and for a long time they turned, danced, screamed, drank. . . .  And so it went on for another year, and another, and a third.  How could she help changing?  And he was the cause of it all.  And, suddenly, all her former bitterness against him reawoke; she wished to scold, to reproach him.  She regretted having neglected the opportunity of repeating to him once more that she knew him, and would not give in to him—­would not let him make use of her spiritually as he had done physically.

And she longed for drink in order to stifle the feeling of pity to herself and the useless feeling of reproach to him.  And she would have broken her word if she had been inside the prison.  Here she could not get any spirits except by applying to the medical assistant, and she was afraid of him because he made up to her, and intimate relations with men were disgusting to her now.  After sitting a while on a form in the passage she returned to her little room, and without paying any heed to her companion’s words, she wept for a long time over her wrecked life.

CHAPTER XIV.

AN ARISTOCRATIC CIRCLE.

Nekhludoff had four matters to attend to in Petersburg.  The first was the appeal to the Senate in Maslova’s case; the second, to hand in Theodosia Birukoff’s petition to the committee; the third, to comply with Vera Doukhova’s requests—­i.e., try to get her friend Shoustova released from prison, and get permission for a mother to visit her son in prison.  Vera Doukhova had written to him about this, and he was going to the Gendarmerie Office to attend to these two matters, which he counted as one.