wing whether the woman he loved--she for
whom he had virtually ruined himself,--was a happy wife, a wretched
bride, or--dead. Nathalie, like all the rest, had passed out of his
life. And night by night he laid him down, clasping in his arms the
gaunt figure of despair, before whose dread embrace courage and manhood
alike fell back, wavered, and seemed to fade from him forever.

* * * * *

The chronicle of a human life can never do justice to nature; for the
reason that, for every man and woman, there come long periods of quiet
labor or inaction when for months, perhaps years, scarce one untoward
incident comes to break the slow routine of existence. The doings of one
day repeat those of the day before, anticipate those of the morrow. What
shall the chronicler do? Send his reader yawning to bed over the
unfinishable tale? Or pass over, in a word, some period in which his
subject is growing and changing, day by day, for better or for worse,
till he emerges from that long, monotonous stretch, a creature
startlingly different from that of the last chapter?--It is to such an
_impasse_ as this that we have arrived with our penniless Ivan. For four
years we find scarce a single mile-stone of event along his highway. And
yet the development of Ivan's secret self was swift; unusual;
tremendous. During this period he grappled frequently with mighty,
rising passions; crushed rebellions; bowed to revolutions carried on
within the kingdom of his soul. Yet he was no weakling, to keep a diary
of moods. And our only testimony of him, is from--let us say--his
landlady, the excellent Elizabeth Stepniak:

A tall fellow, growing a little stooped: silent, unobliging, unsociable;
yet a good lodger in his way, in that he paid his rent, and never
disturbed families below him with the carousals and other performances
common to young bachelors. When he had first come, he had, indeed, spent
an entire summer in shocking idleness; and she, Frau Gemaelin, had
worried, from time to time, about her money; and again sometimes, when
he had paid it without a word, felt inclined, by boldly raising it, to
discover what were really his means. However, in the autumn she did find
out his work. He was a kind of _musiker_; and not only played one or two
simple instruments in the orchestra of a small, third-class theatre near
by, but also copied orchestra parts from original scores, corrected
music proofs, and orchestrated many a