into sobs, she ran as fast as she could, before Ryabovsky came
back, to the entry, put on her goloshes, and went out into the street;
then she breathed easily, and felt she was free for ever from Ryabovsky
and from painting and from the burden of shame which had so crushed her
in the studio. It was all over!

She drove to her dressmaker's; then to see Barnay, who had only arrived
the day before; from Barnay to a music-shop, and all the time she was
thinking how she would write Ryabovsky a cold, cruel letter full of
personal dignity, and how in the spring or the summer she would go with
Dymov to the Crimea, free herself finally from the past there, and begin
a new life.

On getting home late in the evening she sat down in the drawing-room,
without taking off her things, to begin the letter. Ryabovsky had told
her she was not an artist, and to pay him out she wrote to him now that
he painted the same thing every year, and said exactly the same thing
every day; that he was at a standstill, and that nothing more would come
of him than had come already. She wanted to write, too, that he owed a
great deal to her good influence, and that if he was going wrong it was
only because her influence was paralysed by various dubious persons like
the one who had been hiding behind the picture that day.

"Little mother!" Dymov called from the study, without opening the door.

"What is it?"

"Don't come in to me, but only come to the door--that's right.... The
day before yesterday I must have caught diphtheria at the hospital, and
now... I am ill. Make haste and send for Korostelev."

Olga Ivanovna always called her husband by his surname, as she did all
the men of her acquaintance; she disliked his Christian name, Osip,
because it reminded her of the Osip in Gogol and the silly pun on his
name. But now she cried:

"Osip, it cannot be!"

"Send for him; I feel ill," Dymov said behind the door, and she could
hear him go back to the sofa and lie down. "Send!" she heard his voice
faintly.

"Good Heavens!" thought Olga Ivanovna, turning chill with horror. "Why,
it's dangerous!"

For no reason she took the candle and went into the bedroom, and there,
reflecting what she must do, glanced casually at herself in the pier
glass. With her pale, frightened face, in a jacket with sleeves high on
the shoulders, with yellow ruches on her bosom, and with stripes running
in unusual directions on her skirt, she seemed to herself horrible
and