d have been
everlasting, never to be effaced or eradicated. And yet that imprint
wears out as easily as a pair of cheap boots. There is nothing left,
not a scrap. It's as though I hadn't been suffering then, but had
been dancing a mazurka. Everything in the world is transitory, and
that transitoriness is absurd! A wide field for humorists! Tack on
a humorous end, my friend!"

"Pyotr Nikolaevitch, are you coming soon?" The impatient ladies
call my hero.

"This minute," answers the "vain and fatuous" man, setting his tie
straight. "It's absurd and pitiful, my friend, pitiful and absurd,
but what's to be done? _Homo sum_. . . . And I praise Mother Nature
all the same for her transmutation of substances. If we retained
an agonising memory of toothache and of all the terrors which every
one of us has had to experience, if all that were everlasting, we
poor mortals would have a bad time of it in this life."

I look at his smiling face and I remember the despair and the horror
with which his eyes were filled a year ago when he looked at the
dark window. I see him, entering into his habitual role of intellectual
chatterer, prepare to show off his idle theories, such as the
transmutation of substances before me, and at the same time I recall
him sitting on the floor in a pool of blood with his sick imploring
eyes.

"How will it end?" I ask myself aloud.

Vassilyev, whistling and straightening his tie, walks off into the
drawing-room, and I look after him, and feel vexed. For some reason
I regret his past sufferings, I regret all that I felt myself on
that man's account on that terrible night. It is as though I had
lost something. . . .

MARI D'ELLE

IT was a free night. Natalya Andreyevna Bronin (her married name
was Nikitin), the opera singer, is lying in her bedroom, her whole
being abandoned to repose. She lies, deliciously drowsy, thinking
of her little daughter who lives somewhere far away with her
grandmother or aunt. . . . The child is more precious to her than
the public, bouquets, notices in the papers, adorers . . . and she
would be glad to think about her till morning. She is happy, at
peace, and all she longs for is not to be prevented from lying
undisturbed, dozing and dreaming of her little girl.

All at once the singer starts, and opens her eyes wide: there is a
harsh abrupt ring in the entry. Before ten seconds have passed the
bell tinkles a second time and a third time. The door is opened
noisily