no one blame me because the dreams of my youth were as foolish as
those of my childhood and boyhood. I am sure that, even if it be my fate
to live to extreme old age and to continue my story with the years, I,
an old man of seventy, shall be found dreaming dreams just as impossible
and childish as those I am dreaming now. I shall be dreaming of some
lovely Maria who loves me, the toothless old man, as she might love a
Mazeppa; of some imbecile son who, through some extraordinary chance,
has suddenly become a minister of state; of my suddenly receiving a
windfall of a million of roubles. I am sure that there exists no human
being, no human age, to whom or to which that gracious, consolatory
power of dreaming is totally a stranger. Yet, save for the one general
feature of magic and impossibility, the dreams of each human being, of
each age of man, have their own distinguishing characteristics. At the
period upon which I look as having marked the close of my boyhood and
the beginning of my youth, four leading sentiments formed the basis
of my dreams. The first of those sentiments was love for HER--for an
imaginary woman whom I always pictured the same in my dreams, and whom I
somehow expected to meet some day and somewhere. This she of mine had a
little of Sonetchka in her, a little of Masha as Masha could look when
she stood washing linen over the clothes-tub, and a little of a certain
woman with pearls round her fair white neck whom I had once seen long,
long ago at a theatre, in a box below our own. My second sentiment was a
craving for love. I wanted every one to know me and to love me. I wanted
to be able to utter my name--Nicola Irtenieff--and at once to see every
one thunderstruck at it, and come crowding round me and thanking me for
something or another, I hardly knew what. My third sentiment was
the expectation of some extraordinary, glorious happiness that was
impending--some happiness so strong and assured as to verge upon
ecstasy. Indeed, so firmly persuaded was I that very, very soon some
unexpected chance would suddenly make me the richest and most famous
man in the world that I lived in constant, tremulous expectation of this
magic good fortune befalling me. I was always thinking to myself
that "IT is beginning," and that I should go on thereafter to attain
everything that a man could wish for. Consequently, I was for
ever hurrying from place to place, in the belief that "IT" must be
"beginning" just where I h