e eyes he beheld overflowing with her secret woe, as they overlooked
the vast and misty throng of mismated womanhood; lastly of the daughter
of a woman who had rebelled against her lot; the nameless child of
Alexandrine Nikitenko, who, filled as she was with the vivid life of her
passionate heritage, was about to be shrouded away from the world she
loved in the coif and robe of the cloistered nun. Gentle women: pure
men; God's world! Why are the two first so unfitted for the last? To God
we apply the attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence. If
these attributes be true, whence the evil that rules the world?--Is our
God a demon? It is the logical inference.

To-day, for the hundredth time, Ivan cast away his defences of sarcasm,
mockery, sophistry, and faced that question that has gone unanswered
from generation to generation. As he meditated, his face lost its
recently acquired harshness; his deep eyes grew sadder even than their
wont; the look of a vast, ineffaceable weariness settled upon him. With
face uplifted he continued to play, drifting through his own many forms
of that unanswered question into final silence. Then, rising, he passed,
a little unsteadily, into the inner room, and ate once more of the thick
black paste in its golden tube.

Twilight had now long since merged into darkness. In the work-room Ivan
lighted two lamps, and then, going to the fireplace, which he had here
substituted for the traditional stove, and wherein a low fire burned, he
threw on half a dozen blocks of peat. Then, turning to the high bookcase
near at hand, he drew down, with fumbling hands, the sixteen red-leather
books that constituted his journal and newly-written memoirs. Standing
there, he read certain passages of this transcription of his mental
life. Finally, with a straightening of his figure, he took the books one
by one, tore off the covers, and stuffed the closely written sheets into
the flames. Afterwards, like one in a daze, he returned to the piano.

It was his own, strange "Invocation to Death" to which his half-numbed
fingers turned. The sound of the notes reached his ears as if from a
great distance. Also, he was conscious of a feeling of nausea which told
him that the fatal narcotic was working, powerfully. After a time, his
fingers fell from the keys. Out of the enclosing mists he heard a voice
calling: the clear, sweet voice of one distant, but coming nearer. It
was the voice of Sophia, his mother.