throng of fur-clad individuals, many of whom had
travelled some versts to see the train: perhaps accompanying a friend
who was to travel a short distance therein; perhaps to get a load of
merchandise or freight destined for a distant town; or, perhaps, just
for the sake of seeing the engine, the cars, and the crowd that would
assemble about them. Many of these last were country priests, idle on
weekdays, desolate enough in their unique isolation, glad to seek any
sort of distraction for its own sake, and even more eager than their
peasant inferiors for the distinction of a single word of greeting or
command from one of the lords of passage. Ivan was pleased to alight
frequently; get a brief walk in the sharp air; address a word or two to
some adoring native; and scatter a handful of kopecks among the
occasional children of the station-masters. But these paltry happenings
were all forgotten, and his heart full to bursting, when at last, on the
evening of the second day, there gleamed, far ahead through the dusk,
the red lights of St. Petersburg.

* * * * *

The first week of a young man's independence: his entrance into the
exalted rank of high-born bachelorhood--can it ever again be brought up
out of the past a distinct, coherent memory? Hardly. For Ivan and the
capital spun together in the wildest of dances, during the first days of
their meeting. Ivan's mind whirled in a chaos of regimental
introductions and instruction, wearying hunts for suitable bachelor
quarters, long afternoon hours filled with the pungent smell of tanbark
and the careerings of a horse with whom he never came to be on terms of
absolute equality; evenings spent in the glamour of strange restaurants,
the discussion of French _entrees_, and the contemplation of
much-dressed denizens of the high and the half worlds; and, finally,
retirement in a room at the Hotel Bellevue, where a young lieutenant
with only two thousand rubles in his pocket was not a person of any
special importance.

This haze of memory terminated, finally, and objects appeared in a
clearer atmosphere, when young Gregoriev became half-owner of a charming
apartment in the irreproachable _Bashkov Pereolouk_, ten minutes' walk
from his barracks, in partnership with a fellow-officer, one Vladimir de
Windt, destined to become his friend of friends. And shortly after this
momentous step, Ivan took another, by presenting his card in the
_Serghievskaia, num