two or three and twenty, called
Mihail Ivanovitch, with rather a curious short surname--Riss. Two
months later the doctor had seen the young man's photograph in his
wife's album, with an inscription in French: "In remembrance of the
present and in hope of the future." Later on he had met the young
man himself at his mother-in-law's. And that was at the time when
his wife had taken to being very often absent and coming home at
four or five o'clock in the morning, and was constantly asking him
to get her a passport for abroad, which he kept refusing to do; and
a continual feud went on in the house which made him feel ashamed
to face the servants.

Six months before, his colleagues had decided that he was going
into consumption, and advised him to throw up everything and go to
the Crimea. When she heard of this, Olga Dmitrievna affected to be
very much alarmed; she began to be affectionate to her husband, and
kept assuring him that it would be cold and dull in the Crimea, and
that he had much better go to Nice, and that she would go with him,
and there would nurse him, look after him, take care of him.

Now, he understood why his wife was so particularly anxious to go
to Nice: her Michel lived at Monte Carlo.

He took an English dictionary, and translating the words, and
guessing their meaning, by degrees he put together the following
sentence: "I drink to the health of my beloved darling, and kiss
her little foot a thousand times, and am impatiently expecting her
arrival." He pictured the pitiable, ludicrous part he would play
if he had agreed to go to Nice with his wife. He felt so mortified
that he almost shed tears and began pacing to and fro through all
the rooms of the flat in great agitation. His pride, his plebeian
fastidiousness, was revolted. Clenching his fists and scowling with
disgust, he wondered how he, the son of a village priest, brought
up in a clerical school, a plain, straightforward man, a surgeon
by profession--how could he have let himself be enslaved, have
sunk into such shameful bondage to this weak, worthless, mercenary,
low creature.

"'Little foot'!" he muttered to himself, crumpling up the telegram;
"'little foot'!"

Of the time when he fell in love and proposed to her, and the seven
years that he had been living with her, all that remained in his
memory was her long, fragrant hair, a mass of soft lace, and her
little feet, which certainly were very small, beautiful feet; and
even now