eel equal to asking her the simple question, "How do you like
being here?" The question seemed awkward and unnecessary. Probably
the same change had taken place in her. She was in no haste to turn
the conversation to her mother, to her home, to her relations with
Vlassitch; she did not defend herself, she did not say that free
unions are better than marriages in the church; she was not agitated,
and calmly brooded over the story of Olivier. . . . And why had
they suddenly begun talking of Olivier?

"You are both of you wet with the rain," said Zina, and she smiled
joyfully; she was touched by this point of resemblance between her
brother and Vlassitch.

And Pyotr Mihalitch felt all the bitterness and horror of his
position. He thought of his deserted home, the closed piano, and
Zina's bright little room into which no one went now; he thought
there were no prints of little feet on the garden-paths, and that
before tea no one went off, laughing gaily, to bathe. What he had
clung to more and more from his childhood upwards, what he had loved
thinking about when he used to sit in the stuffy class-room or the
lecture theatre--brightness, purity, and joy, everything that
filled the house with life and light, had gone never to return, had
vanished, and was mixed up with a coarse, clumsy story of some
battalion officer, a chivalrous lieutenant, a depraved woman and a
grandfather who had shot himself. . . . And to begin to talk about
his mother or to think that the past could ever return would mean
not understanding what was clear.

Pyotr Mihalitch's eyes filled with tears and his hand began to
tremble as it lay on the table. Zina guessed what he was thinking
about, and her eyes, too, glistened and looked red.

"Grigory, come here," she said to Vlassitch.

They walked away to the window and began talking of something in a
whisper. From the way that Vlassitch stooped down to her and the
way she looked at him, Pyotr Mihalitch realised again that everything
was irreparably over, and that it was no use to talk of anything.
Zina went out of the room.

"Well, brother!" Vlassitch began, after a brief silence, rubbing
his hands and smiling. "I called our life happiness just now, but
that was, so to speak, poetical license. In reality, there has not
been a sense of happiness so far. Zina has been thinking all the
time of you, of her mother, and has been worrying; looking at her,
I, too, felt worried. Hers is a bold, free nature,