Page:The Kiss and Other Stories by Anton Tchekhoff, 1908.pdf/149

 blue distances — all the vanity and parade of Nature had been taken from the Volga and packed in a box until the coming spring; and that the ravens flying over the river mocked it and cried, “Naked! Naked!” Riabovsky listened to their cry, and brooded on the exhaustion and loss of his talent: and he thought that all the world was conditional, relative, and stupid, and that he should not have tied himself up with this woman. In one word he was out of spirits, and sulked.

On her bed behind the partition, pulling at her pretty hair, sat Olga Ivanovna; and pictured herself at home, first in the drawing-room, then in her bedroom, then in her husband's study; imagination bore her to theatres, to her dressmaker, to her friends. What was DuimofF doing now? Did he think of her? The season had already begun; it was time to think of the evening parties. And Duimoff? Dear Duimoff! How kindly, with what infantile complaints, he begged her in his letters to come home! Every month he sent her seventy-five roubles, and when she Avrote that she had boiTowed a hundred from the artists he sent her also that hundred. The good, the generous man! Olga Ivanovna was tired of the tour; she suffered from tedium, and wished to escape as soon as possible from the muzhiks, from the river damp, from the feeling of physical uncleanliness caused by living in huts and wandering from village to village.