Then stopping, he lit a cigarette, and tried to think of other things.  He would send her money, without ever letting her see him.  But memories came again.  He remembered—­it was not so very long ago, for she was more than twenty then—­her beginning a flirtation with a boy of fourteen, a cadet of the Corps of Pages who had been staying with them in the country.  She had driven the boy half crazy; he had wept in his distraction.  Then how she had rebuked her father severely, coldly, and even rudely, when, to put an end to this stupid affair, he had sent the boy away.  She seemed somehow to consider herself insulted.  Since then father and daughter had drifted into undisguised hostility.

“I was right,” he said to himself.  “She is a wicked and shameless woman.”

And then, as a last ghastly memory, there was the letter from Moscow, in which she wrote that she could not return home; that she was a miserable, abandoned woman, asking only to be forgiven and forgotten.  Then the horrid recollection of the scene with his wife came to him; their surmises and their suspicions, which became a certainty.  The calamity had happened in Finland, where they had let her visit her aunt; and the culprit was an insignificant Swede, a student, an empty-headed, worthless creature—­and married.

All this came back to him now as he paced backwards and forwards on the bedroom carpet, recollecting his former love for her, his pride in her.  He recoiled with terror before the incomprehensible fact of her downfall, and he hated her for the agony she was causing him.  He remembered the conversation with his sister-in-law, and tried to imagine how he might forgive her.  But as soon as the thought of “him” arose, there surged up in his heart horror, disgust, and wounded pride.  He groaned aloud, and tried to think of something else.

“No, it is impossible; I will hand over the money to Peter to give her monthly.  And as for me, I have no longer a daughter.”

And again a curious feeling overpowered him:  a mixture of self-pity at the recollection of his love for her, and of fury against her for causing him this anguish.

II

During the last year Lisa had without doubt lived through more than in all the preceding twenty-five.  Suddenly she had realised the emptiness of her whole life.  It rose before her, base and sordid—­this life at home and among the rich set in St. Petersburg—­this animal existence that never sounded the depths, but only touched the shallows of life.

It was well enough for a year or two, or perhaps even three.  But when it went on for seven or eight years, with its parties, balls, concerts, and suppers; with its costumes and coiffures to display the charms of the body; with its adorers old and young, all alike seemingly possessed of some unaccountable right to have everything, to laugh at everything; and with its summer months spent in the same way, everything yielding but a superficial pleasure, even music and reading merely touching upon life’s problems, but never solving them—­all this holding out no promise of change, and losing its charm more and more—­she began to despair.  She had desperate moods when she longed to die.