sed in some three months through experiences
that would have been ample for a whole lifetime!"

Vladimir Semyonitch looked round him, took me by the sleeve, and
began to whisper:

"You know, after taking her degree she married, for love, an
architect. It's a complete tragedy! They had hardly been married a
month when--whew--her husband died of typhus. But that was not
all. She caught typhus from him, and when, on her recovery, she
learnt that her Ivan was dead, she took a good dose of morphia. If
it had not been for vigorous measures taken by her friends, my Vera
would have been by now in Paradise. Tell me, isn't it a tragedy?
And is not my sister like an _ingenue_, who has played already all
the five acts of her life? The audience may stay for the farce, but
the _ingenue_ must go home to rest."

After three months of misery Vera Semyonovna had come to live with
her brother. She was not fitted for the practice of medicine, which
exhausted her and did not satisfy her; she did not give one the
impression of knowing her subject, and I never once heard her say
anything referring to her medical studies.

She gave up medicine, and, silent and unoccupied, as though she
were a prisoner, spent the remainder of her youth in colourless
apathy, with bowed head and hanging hands. The only thing to which
she was not completely indifferent, and which brought some brightness
into the twilight of her life, was the presence of her brother,
whom she loved. She loved him himself and his programme, she was
full of reverence for his articles; and when she was asked what her
brother was doing, she would answer in a subdued voice as though
afraid of waking or distracting him: "He is writing. . . ." Usually
when he was at his work she used to sit beside him, her eyes fixed
on his writing hand. She used at such moments to look like a sick
animal warming itself in the sun. . . .

One winter evening Vladimir Semyonitch was sitting at his table
writing a critical article for his newspaper: Vera Semyonovna was
sitting beside him, staring as usual at his writing hand. The critic
wrote rapidly, without erasures or corrections. The pen scratched
and squeaked. On the table near the writing hand there lay open a
freshly-cut volume of a thick magazine, containing a story of peasant
life, signed with two initials. Vladimir Semyonitch was enthusiastic;
he thought the author was admirable in his handling of the subject,
suggested Turgenev in his descr