it is beyond my power to
alter that part. I run to my room and fall on my bed, and think and
think, and can come to no conclusion; and all that is clear to me
is that I want to live, and that the plainer and the colder and the
harder her face grows, the nearer she is to me, and the more intensely
and painfully I feel our kinship. Never mind "My good sir," never
mind her light careless tone, never mind anything you like, only
don't leave me, my treasure. I am afraid to be alone.

Then I go out into the corridor again, listen in a tremor. . . . I
have no dinner; I don't notice the approach of evening. At last
about eleven I hear the familiar footstep, and at the turn near the
stairs Zinaida Fyodorovna comes into sight.

"Are you taking a walk?" she would ask as she passes me. "You had
better go out into the air. . . . Good-night!"

"But shall we not meet again to-day?"

"I think it's late. But as you like."

"Tell me, where have you been?" I would ask, following her into the
room.

"Where? To Monte Carlo." She took ten gold coins out of her pocket
and said: "Look, my good sir; I have won. That's at roulette."

"Nonsense! As though you would gamble."

"Why not? I am going again to-morrow."

I imagined her with a sick and morbid face, in her condition, tightly
laced, standing near the gaming-table in a crowd of cocottes, of
old women in their dotage who swarm round the gold like flies round
the honey. I remembered she had gone off to Monte Carlo for some
reason in secret from me.

"I don't believe you," I said one day. "You wouldn't go there."

"Don't agitate yourself. I can't lose much."

"It's not the question of what you lose," I said with annoyance.
"Has it never occurred to you while you were playing there that the
glitter of gold, all these women, young and old, the croupiers, all
the surroundings--that it is all a vile, loathsome mockery at the
toiler's labour, at his bloody sweat?

"If one doesn't play, what is one to do here?" she asked. "The
toiler's labour and his bloody sweat--all that eloquence you can
put off till another time; but now, since you have begun, let me
go on. Let me ask you bluntly, what is there for me to do here, and
what am I to do?"

"What are you to do?" I said, shrugging my shoulders. "That's a
question that can't be answered straight off."

"I beg you to answer me honestly, Vladimir Ivanitch," she said, and
her face looked angry. "Once I have brought myself to ask you t