ill the first two or
three stages have been passed imagination continues to dwell on the
place left behind, but with the first morning on the road it leaps to
the end of the journey and there begins building castles in the air. So
it happened to Olenin.

After leaving the town behind, he gazed at the snowy fields and felt
glad to be alone in their midst. Wrapping himself in his fur coat, he
lay at the bottom of the sledge, became tranquil, and fell into a doze.
The parting with his friends had touched him deeply, and memories of
that last winter spent in Moscow and images of the past, mingled with
vague thoughts and regrets, rose unbidden in his imagination.

He remembered the friend who had seen him off and his relations with
the girl they had talked about. The girl was rich. "How could he love
her knowing that she loved me?" thought he, and evil suspicions crossed
his mind. "There is much dishonesty in men when one comes to reflect."
Then he was confronted by the question: "But really, how is it I have
never been in love? Every one tells me that I never have. Can it be
that I am a moral monstrosity?" And he began to recall all his
infatuations. He recalled his entry into society, and a friend's sister
with whom he spent several evenings at a table with a lamp on it which
lit up her slender fingers busy with needlework, and the lower part of
her pretty delicate face. He recalled their conversations that dragged
on like the game in which one passes on a stick which one keeps alight
as long as possible, and the general awkwardness and restraint and his
continual feeling of rebellion at all that conventionality. Some voice
had always whispered: "That's not it, that's not it," and so it had
proved. Then he remembered a ball and the mazurka he danced with the
beautiful D----. "How much in love I was that night and how happy! And
how hurt and vexed I was next morning when I woke and felt myself still
free! Why does not love come and bind me hand and foot?" thought he.
"No, there is no such thing as love! That neighbour who used to tell
me, as she told Dubrovin and the Marshal, that she loved the stars, was
not IT either." And now his farming and work in the country recurred to
his mind, and in those recollections also there was nothing to dwell on
with pleasure. "Will they talk long of my departure?" came into his
head; but who "they" were he did not quite know. Next came a thought
that made him wince and mutter incoherentl