or himself sat
modestly behind the curtain and only his hands were visible. The curtain
quivered; the orchestra tuned up for a long time, and while the audience
were coming in and taking their seats, Gomov gazed eagerly round.

At last Anna Sergueyevna came in. She took her seat in the third row,
and when Gomov glanced at her his heart ached and he knew that for him
there was no one in the whole world nearer, dearer, and more important
than she; she was lost in this provincial rabble, the little
undistinguished woman, with a common lorgnette in her hands, yet she
filled his whole life; she was his grief, his joy, his only happiness,
and he longed for her; and through the noise of the bad orchestra with
its tenth-rate fiddles, he thought how dear she was to him. He thought
and dreamed.

With Anna Sergueyevna there came in a young man with short
side-whiskers, very tall, stooping; with every movement he shook and
bowed continually. Probably he was the husband whom in a bitter mood at
Talta she had called a lackey. And, indeed, in his long figure, his
side-whiskers, the little bald patch on the top of his head, there was
something of the lackey; he had a modest sugary smile and in his
buttonhole he wore a University badge exactly like a lackey's number.

In the first entr'acte the husband went out to smoke, and she was left
alone. Gomov, who was also in the pit, came up to her and said in a
trembling voice with a forced smile:

"How do you do?"

She looked up at him and went pale. Then she glanced at him again in
terror, not believing her eyes, clasped her fan and lorgnette tightly
together, apparently struggling to keep herself from fainting. Both were
silent. She sat, he stood; frightened by her emotion, not daring to sit
down beside her. The fiddles and flutes began to play and suddenly it
seemed to them as though all the people in the boxes were looking at
them. She got up and walked quickly to the exit; he followed, and both
walked absently along the corridors, down the stairs, up the stairs,
with the crowd shifting and shimmering before their eyes; all kinds of
uniforms, judges, teachers, crown-estates, and all with badges; ladies
shone and shimmered before them, like fur coats on moving rows of
clothes-pegs, and there was a draught howling through the place laden
with the smell of tobacco and cigar-ends. And Gomov, whose heart was
thudding wildly, thought:

"Oh, Lord! Why all these men and that beastly orches