erfectly satisfied with my letter to Simonov. But
on this point I was not satisfied at all. It was as though I were
worried only by Liza. "What if she comes," I thought incessantly,
"well, it doesn't matter, let her come! H'm! it's horrid that she
should see, for instance, how I live. Yesterday I seemed such a hero
to her, while now, h'm! It's horrid, though, that I have let myself go
so, the room looks like a beggar's. And I brought myself to go out to
dinner in such a suit! And my American leather sofa with the stuffing
sticking out. And my dressing-gown, which will not cover me, such
tatters, and she will see all this and she will see Apollon. That
beast is certain to insult her. He will fasten upon her in order to be
rude to me. And I, of course, shall be panic-stricken as usual, I shall
begin bowing and scraping before her and pulling my dressing-gown round
me, I shall begin smiling, telling lies. Oh, the beastliness! And it
isn't the beastliness of it that matters most! There is something more
important, more loathsome, viler! Yes, viler! And to put on that
dishonest lying mask again! ..."

When I reached that thought I fired up all at once.

"Why dishonest? How dishonest? I was speaking sincerely last night.
I remember there was real feeling in me, too. What I wanted was to
excite an honourable feeling in her.... Her crying was a good thing,
it will have a good effect."

Yet I could not feel at ease. All that evening, even when I had come
back home, even after nine o'clock, when I calculated that Liza could
not possibly come, still she haunted me, and what was worse, she came
back to my mind always in the same position. One moment out of all
that had happened last night stood vividly before my imagination; the
moment when I struck a match and saw her pale, distorted face, with its
look of torture. And what a pitiful, what an unnatural, what a
distorted smile she had at that moment! But I did not know then, that
fifteen years later I should still in my imagination see Liza, always
with the pitiful, distorted, inappropriate smile which was on her face
at that minute.

Next day I was ready again to look upon it all as nonsense, due to
over-excited nerves, and, above all, as EXAGGERATED. I was always
conscious of that weak point of mine, and sometimes very much afraid of
it. "I exaggerate everything, that is where I go wrong," I repeated to
myself every hour. But, however, "Liza will ver