tion, would suddenly grasp her hand and
exclaim, "You darling!" in a burst of delight.

The house, hers by inheritance, in which she had lived from birth, was
located at the outskirts of the city on the Gypsy Road, not far from
the Tivoli. From early evening till late at night she could hear the
music in the theatre and the bursting of the rockets; and it seemed to
her that Kukin was roaring and battling with his fate and taking his
chief enemy, the indifferent public, by assault. Her heart melted
softly, she felt no desire to sleep, and when Kukin returned home
towards morning, she tapped on her window-pane, and through the
curtains he saw her face and one shoulder and the kind smile she gave
him.

He proposed to her, and they were married. And when he had a good look
of her neck and her full vigorous shoulders, he clapped his hands and
said:

"You darling!"

He was happy. But it rained on their wedding-day, and the expression
of despair never left his face.

They got along well together. She sat in the cashier's box, kept the
theatre in order, wrote down the expenses, and paid out the salaries.
Her rosy cheeks, her kind naive smile, like a halo around her face,
could be seen at the cashier's window, behind the scenes, and in the
cafe. She began to tell her friends that the theatre was the greatest,
the most important, the most essential thing in the world, that it was
the only place to obtain true enjoyment in and become humanised and
educated.

"But do you suppose the public appreciates it?" she asked. "What the
public wants is the circus. Yesterday Vanichka and I gave _Faust
Burlesqued_, and almost all the boxes were empty. If we had given some
silly nonsense, I assure you, the theatre would have been overcrowded.
To-morrow we'll put _Orpheus in Hades_ on. Do come."

Whatever Kukin said about the theatre and the actors, she repeated.
She spoke, as he did, with contempt of the public, of its indifference
to art, of its boorishness. She meddled in the rehearsals, corrected
the actors, watched the conduct of the musicians; and when an
unfavourable criticism appeared in the local paper, she wept and went
to the editor to argue with him.

The actors were fond of her and called her "Vanichka and I" and "the
darling." She was sorry for them and lent them small sums. When they
bilked her, she never complained to her husband; at the utmost she
shed a few tears.

In winter, too, they got along nicely together. Th