l the girls who visited the Stahovs' house. Her
parents' authority had never weighed heavily on Elena, and from her
sixteenth year she became absolutely independent; she began to live a
life of her own, but it was a life of solitude. Her soul glowed, and the
fire died away again in solitude; she struggled like a bird in a cage,
and cage there was none; no one oppressed her, no one restrained her,
while she was torn, and fretted within. Sometimes she did not understand
herself, was even frightened of herself. Everything that surrounded her
seemed to her half-senseless, half-incomprehensible. 'How live without
love? and there's no one to love!' she thought; and she felt terror
again at these thoughts, these sensations. At eighteen, she nearly
died of malignant fever; her whole constitution--naturally healthy
and vigorous--was seriously affected, and it was long before it could
perfectly recover; the last traces of the illness disappeared at last,
but Elena Nikolaevna's father was never tired of talking with some
spitefulness of her 'nerves.' Sometimes she fancied that she wanted
something which no one wanted, of which no one in all Russia dreamed.
Then she would grow calmer, and even laugh at herself, and pass day
after day unconcernedly; but suddenly some over-mastering, nameless
force would surge up within her, and seem to clamour for an outlet. The
storm passed over, and the wings of her soul drooped without flight; but
these tempests of feeling cost her much. However she might strive not
to betray what was passing within her, the suffering of the tormented
spirit was expressed in her even external tranquillity, and her parents
were often justified in shrugging their shoulders in astonishment, and
failing to understand her 'queer ways.'

On the day with which our story began, Elena did not leave the window
till later than usual. She thought much of Bersenyev, and of her
conversation with him. She liked him; she believed in the warmth of his
feelings, and the purity of his aims. He had never before talked to her
as on that evening. She recalled the expression of his timid eyes, his
smiles--and she smiled herself and fell to musing, but not of him. She
began to look out into the night from the open window. For a long time
she gazed at the dark, low-hanging sky; then she got up, flung back her
hair from her face with a shake of her head, and, herself not knowing
why, she stretched out to it--to that sky--her bare chilled a