ilently, stealthily, then blew her nose
also stealthily, sighed, and noiselessly returned to her invariable
position on her stool by the window.

The student drew his textbook to him and began again pacing from
corner to corner. "The right lung consists of three parts," he
repeated; "the upper part, on anterior wall of thorax, reaches the
fourth or fifth rib . . . ."

In the passage some one shouted at the top of his voice: "Grigory!
The samovar!"

THE TWO VOLODYAS

"LET me; I want to drive myself! I'll sit by the driver!" Sofya
Lvovna said in a loud voice. "Wait a minute, driver; I'll get up
on the box beside you."

She stood up in the sledge, and her husband, Vladimir Nikititch,
and the friend of her childhood, Vladimir Mihalovitch, held her
arms to prevent her falling. The three horses were galloping fast.

"I said you ought not to have given her brandy," Vladimir Nikititch
whispered to his companion with vexation. "What a fellow you are,
really!"

The Colonel knew by experience that in women like his wife, Sofya
Lvovna, after a little too much wine, turbulent gaiety was followed
by hysterical laughter and then tears. He was afraid that when they
got home, instead of being able to sleep, he would have to be
administering compresses and drops.

"Wo!" cried Sofya Lvovna. "I want to drive myself!"

She felt genuinely gay and triumphant. For the last two months,
ever since her wedding, she had been tortured by the thought that
she had married Colonel Yagitch from worldly motives and, as it is
said, _par depit_; but that evening, at the restaurant, she had
suddenly become convinced that she loved him passionately. In spite
of his fifty-four years, he was so slim, agile, supple, he made
puns and hummed to the gipsies' tunes so charmingly. Really, the
older men were nowadays a thousand times more interesting than the
young. It seemed as though age and youth had changed parts. The
Colonel was two years older than her father, but could there be any
importance in that if, honestly speaking, there were infinitely
more vitality, go, and freshness in him than in herself, though she
was only twenty-three?

"Oh, my darling!" she thought. "You are wonderful!"

She had become convinced in the restaurant, too, that not a spark
of her old feeling remained. For the friend of her childhood,
Vladimir Mihalovitch, or simply Volodya, with whom only the day
before she had been madly, miserably in love, she now felt nothing