in him.  But as he told me, sitting through the purple hours of the night, watching the light break in ripples and circles of colour over the sea, he regained some of the splendours of that great day, and before he had finished his tale he was right back in that fantastic world that had burst at the touch like bubbles in the sun.  I will give his account, as accurately as possible in his own words.  I seldom interrupted him, and I think he soon forgot that I was there.  He had come to me that night in a panic, for reasons which will he given later and I, in trying to reassure him, had reminded him of that day, when the world was suddenly Utopia.

“That did exist, that world,” I said.  “And once having existed it cannot now be dead.  Believe, believe that it will come back.”

“Come back!” He shook his head.  “Even if it is still there I cannot go back to it.  I will tell you, Ivan Andreievitch, what that day was... and why now I am so bitterly punished for having believed in it.  Listen, what happened to me.  It occurred, all of it, exactly as I tell you.  You know that, just at that time, I had been worrying very much about Vera.  The Revolution had come I suppose very suddenly to every one; but truly to myself, because I had been thinking of Vera, it was like a thunder-clap.  It’s always been my trouble, Ivan Andreievitch, that I can’t think of more than one thing at once, and the worry of it has been that in my life there has been almost invariably more than one thing that I ought to think of....  I would think of my invention, you know, that I ought to get on with it a little faster.  Because really—­it was making a sort of cloth out of bark that I was working at; as every day passed, I could see more and more clearly that there was a great deal in this particular invention, and that it only needed real application to bring it properly forward.  Only application as you know is my trouble.  If I could only shut my brain up....”

He told me then, I remember, a lot about his early childhood, and then the struggle that he had had to see one thing at once, and not two or three things that got in the way and hindered him from doing anything.  He went on about Vera.

“You know that one night I had crept up into your room, and looked to see whether there were possibly a letter there.  That was a disgraceful thing to do, wasn’t it?  But I felt then that I had to satisfy myself.  I wonder whether I can make you understand.  It wasn’t jealousy exactly, because I had never felt that I had had any very strong right over Vera, considering the way that she had married me; but I don’t think I ever loved her more than I did during those weeks, and she was unattainable.  I was lonely, Ivan Andreievitch, that’s the truth.  Everything seemed to be slipping away from me, and in some way Alexei Petrovitch Semyonov seemed to accentuate that.  He was always reminding me of one day or another when I had been happy with Vera long ago—­some silly little