lasping her hands
with enthusiasm, "you are simply fascinating! My friends, look at his
forehead! Dymov, turn your profile. Look! he has the face of a Bengal
tiger and an expression as kind and sweet as a gazelle. Ah, the
darling!"

The visitors ate, and, looking at Dymov, thought, "He really is a nice
fellow"; but they soon forgot about him, and went on talking about the
theatre, music, and painting.

The young people were happy, and their life flowed on without a hitch.

The third week of their honeymoon was spent, however, not quite
happily--sadly, indeed. Dymov caught erysipelas in the hospital, was in
bed for six days, and had to have his beautiful black hair cropped. Olga
Ivanovna sat beside him and wept bitterly, but when he was better she
put a white handkerchief on his shaven head and began to paint him as
a Bedouin. And they were both in good spirits. Three days after he had
begun to go back to the hospital he had another mischance.

"I have no luck, little mother," he said one day at dinner. "I had four
dissections to do today, and I cut two of my fingers at one. And I did
not notice it till I got home."

Olga Ivanovna was alarmed. He smiled, and told her that it did not
matter, and that he often cut his hands when he was dissecting.

"I get absorbed, little mother, and grow careless."

Olga Ivanovna dreaded symptoms of blood-poisoning, and prayed about it
every night, but all went well. And again life flowed on peaceful and
happy, free from grief and anxiety. The present was happy, and to follow
it spring was at hand, already smiling in the distance, and promising a
thousand delights. There would be no end to their happiness. In
April, May and June a summer villa a good distance out of town; walks,
sketching, fishing, nightingales; and then from July right on to autumn
an artist's tour on the Volga, and in this tour Olga Ivanovna would take
part as an indispensable member of the society. She had already had made
for her two travelling dresses of linen, had bought paints, brushes,
canvases, and a new palette for the journey. Almost every day Ryabovsky
visited her to see what progress she was making in her painting; when
she showed him her painting, he used to thrust his hands deep into his
pockets, compress his lips, sniff, and say:

"Ye--es...! That cloud of yours is screaming: it's not in the evening
light. The foreground is somehow chewed up, and there is something,
you know, not the thing.... And