'Men wounded to death don't fling themselves about,' he thought, 'as it has come, so it has gone. All this is natural enough: I always expected it. . . .' (He was lying to himself; he had never expected anything like it.) 'Crying? . . . Was she crying? . . . What was she crying for? Why, she did not love me! But all that is easily understood and in accordance with her character. She—she is not worthy of me. . . . That's it!' (He laughed bitterly.) 'She did not know herself what power was latent in her,—well, convinced of it in her effect at the ball, was it likely she would stay with an insignificant student?—all that 's easily understood.'
But then he remembered her tender words, her smile, and those eyes, those never to be forgotten eyes, which he would never see again, which used to shine and melt at simply meeting his eyes; he recalled one swift, timorous, burning kiss—and suddenly he fell to sobbing, sobbing convulsively, furiously, vindictively; turned over on his face, and choking and stifling with frenzied satisfaction as though thirsting to tear himself to pieces with all around him, he turned his hot face in the sofa pillow, and bit it in his teeth.
Alas! the gentleman whom Litvinov had seen the day before in the carriage was no other
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