id Simeon, and at once he fell asleep. Soon
the others slept too and the door was left open.

THE LADY WITH THE TOY DOG

It was reported that a new face had been seen on the quay; a lady with a
little dog. Dimitri Dimitrich Gomov, who had been a fortnight at Talta
and had got used to it, had begun to show an interest in new faces. As
he sat in the pavilion at Verne's he saw a young lady, blond and fairly
tall, and wearing a broad-brimmed hat, pass along the quay. After her
ran a white Pomeranian.

Later he saw her in the park and in the square several times a day. She
walked by herself, always in the same broad-brimmed hat, and with this
white dog. Nobody knew who she was, and she was spoken of as the lady
with the toy dog.

"If," thought Gomov, "if she is here without a husband or a friend, it
would be as well to make her acquaintance."

He was not yet forty, but he had a daughter of twelve and two boys at
school. He had married young, in his second year at the University, and
now his wife seemed half as old again as himself. She was a tall woman,
with dark eyebrows, erect, grave, stolid, and she thought herself an
intellectual woman. She read a great deal, called her husband not
Dimitri, but Demitri, and in his private mind he thought her
short-witted, narrow-minded, and ungracious. He was afraid of her and
disliked being at home. He had begun to betray her with other women long
ago, betrayed her frequently, and, probably for that reason nearly
always spoke ill of women, and when they were discussed in his presence
he would maintain that they were an inferior race.

It seemed to him that his experience was bitter enough to give him the
right to call them any name he liked, but he could not live a couple of
days without the "inferior race." With men he was bored and ill at ease,
cold and unable to talk, but when he was with women, he felt easy and
knew what to talk about, and how to behave, and even when he was silent
with them he felt quite comfortable. In his appearance as in his
character, indeed in his whole nature, there was something attractive,
indefinable, which drew women to him and charmed them; he knew it, and
he, too, was drawn by some mysterious power to them.

His frequent, and, indeed, bitter experiences had taught him long ago
that every affair of that kind, at first a divine diversion, a delicious
smooth adventure, is in the end a source of worry for a decent man,
especially for men lik