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328 everything. Of course, he loved me, but chiefly from vanity. Now that he is not proud of me any more, it is over. He is ashamed of me. He has taken from me all that he could take, and now I am of no use to him. I weigh upon him, and he does not want to be in dishonorable relationship with me. He said, yesterday, he wanted the divorce and to marry me so as to burn his ships. Perhaps he loves me still,—but how? The zest is gone," she said in English.—"That man likes to show off, and he is mighty proud of himself," she added, as she looked at a ruddy-faced man riding by on a hired horse.

"There is nothing about me any longer to his taste. If I leave him, he will rejoice in the bottom of his heart."

This was not mere hypothesis; she saw this clearly, in that penetrating light which now revealed to her the meaning of life and of her false relations.

"My love has been growing more and more passionate and selfish; his has been growing fainter and fainter. That is why we cannot get on together." She went on thinking. "There can't be any help for it. He is all in all to me. I struggle to draw him closer and closer to me, and he wants to fly from me. Up to the time of our union, we flew to meet each other; but now we move irresistibly apart. This cannot be altered. He accuses me of being absurdly jealous,—and I am; I confess that I am absurdly jealous, and yet I am not either. I am not jealous, but my love is no longer satisfied. But ...." she opened her mouth to speak, and, in the excitement caused by the stress of her thoughts, she changed her place in the carriage.

"If I could only be something else than a passionate mistress, but I cannot, and I do not wish to be; and by this very wish I awake his dislike of me, while he stirs up all my evil passions, and this cannot be otherwise.

"Don't I know that he would not deceive me, that he is no longer in love with Kitty, that he has no intention of marrying Sorokina? I know it well, but it is none the easier for me. If now that he no longer loves me, he is kind, affectionate to me, merely from a sense of