tion, and so he talked with her—all the same the time would be wasted—he talked with her, and became quite friendly with her. The lady was a widow of nineteen; she was not poor, and, generally speaking, she was in an absolutely independent position, an intellectual and respectable woman. Rakhmétof's fiery speeches, of course not on the subject of love, charmed her. "I see him in my dreams surrounded by a halo," she said to Kirsánof. Rakhmétof also fell in love with her. She, judging by his dress, and by everything else, supposed that he was a man who had absolutely nothing, and therefore she was the first to confess her love, and she offered to marry him, when on the eleventh day he got up and said that he was able to go home.
"I have been more frank with you than with others. You see, such people as I have no right to unite the fate of any one else with their own."
"Yes, that is true," she said; "you have no right to marry. But till the time when you must renounce me, love me."
"No, I cannot accept that," he said. "I must suppress love in my heart; to love you would tie my hands. Even as it is, they cannot be free so soon, for they are already tied. But I shall untie them; I must not love."
What became of the lady? A crisis must have come into her life. In all probability she also became an extraordinary person. I wanted to find out about it, but I cannot. Kirsánof did not tell me her name, and he himself did not know what became of her. Rakhmétof asked him not to see her and not to inquire about her. "If I supposed that you knew anything about her, I could not refrain from asking, and that would not do."
After hearing this story, all remembered that for a month or two afterwards, and maybe more, Rakhmétof was more melancholy than usual, did not get angry with himself, no matter how his "eyes were pinched" by his low weakness,—that is, for cigars,—and did not smile sweetly and broadly when he was flattered with the name of Nikitushka Lomof. And I recollected also more, that summer, three or four times in conversations with me (some time after our first conversation he began to be fond of me, because I laughed at him), when I was alone with him, and in reply to my rallying him, would utter such words as these: "Yes, pity me; you are right. I myself am not an abstract idea; I am a
