d, but rather stupid husband, and no children.
She used suddenly to go abroad, and suddenly return to Russia, and led
an eccentric life in general. She had the reputation of being a
frivolous coquette, abandoned herself eagerly to every sort of
pleasure, danced to exhaustion, laughed and jested with young men, whom
she received in the dim light of her drawing-room before dinner; while
at night she wept and prayed, found no peace in anything, and often
paced her room till morning, wringing her hands in anguish, or sat,
pale and chill, over a psalter. Day came, and she was transformed again
into a grand lady; again she went out, laughed, chattered, and simply
flung herself headlong into anything which could afford her the
slightest distraction. She was marvellously well-proportioned, her hair
coloured like gold and heavy as gold hung below her knees, but no one
would have called her a beauty; in her whole face the only good point
was her eyes, and even her eyes were not good--they were grey, and not
large--but their glance was swift and deep, unconcerned to the point of
audacity, and thoughtful to the point of melancholy--an enigmatic
glance. There was a light of something extraordinary in them, even
while her tongue was lisping the emptiest of inanities. She dressed
with elaborate care. Pavel Petrovitch met her at a ball, danced a
mazurka with her, in the course of which she did not utter a single
rational word, and fell passionately in love with her. Being accustomed
to make conquests, in this instance, too, he soon attained his object,
but his easy success did not damp his ardour. On the contrary, he was
in still more torturing, still closer bondage to this woman, in whom,
even at the very moment when she surrendered herself utterly, there
seemed always something still mysterious and unattainable, to which
none could penetrate. What was hidden in that soul--God knows! It
seemed as though she were in the power of mysterious forces,
incomprehensible even to herself; they seemed to play on her at will;
her intellect was not powerful enough to master their caprices. Her
whole behaviour presented a series of inconsistencies; the only letters
which could have awakened her husband's just suspicions, she wrote to a
man who was almost a stranger to her, whilst her love had always an
element of melancholy; with a man she had chosen as a lover, she ceased
to laugh and to jest, she listened to him, and gazed at him with a look
of b