ga, and after nine
o'clock it had begun to spout with rain. And there seemed no hope of the
sky clearing. Over their morning tea Ryabovsky told Olga Ivanovna that
painting was the most ungrateful and boring art, that he was not an
artist, that none but fools thought that he had any talent, and all at
once, for no rhyme or reason, he snatched up a knife and with it scraped
over his very best sketch. After his tea he sat plunged in gloom at the
window and gazed at the Volga. And now the Volga was dingy, all of
one even colour without a gleam of light, cold-looking. Everything,
everything recalled the approach of dreary, gloomy autumn. And it seemed
as though nature had removed now from the Volga the sumptuous green
covers from the banks, the brilliant reflections of the sunbeams, the
transparent blue distance, and all its smart gala array, and had packed
it away in boxes till the coming spring, and the crows were flying above
the Volga and crying tauntingly, "Bare, bare!"

Ryabovsky heard their cawing, and thought he had already gone off
and lost his talent, that everything in this world was relative,
conditional, and stupid, and that he ought not to have taken up with
this woman.... In short, he was out of humour and depressed.

Olga Ivanovna sat behind the screen on the bed, and, passing her
fingers through her lovely flaxen hair, pictured herself first in the
drawing-room, then in the bedroom, then in her husband's study; her
imagination carried her to the theatre, to the dress-maker, to her
distinguished friends. Were they getting something up now? Did they
think of her? The season had begun by now, and it would be time to think
about her "At Homes." And Dymov? Dear Dymov! with what gentleness and
childlike pathos he kept begging her in his letters to make haste and
come home! Every month he sent her seventy-five roubles, and when she
wrote him that she had lent the artists a hundred roubles, he sent that
hundred too. What a kind, generous-hearted man! The travelling wearied
Olga Ivanovna; she was bored; and she longed to get away from the
peasants, from the damp smell of the river, and to cast off the feeling
of physical uncleanliness of which she was conscious all the time,
living in the peasants' huts and wandering from village to village. If
Ryabovsky had not given his word to the artists that he would stay with
them till the twentieth of September, they might have gone away that
very day. And how nice that would