In the evening we ate oysters, drank wine, and went out in a gondola.  I remember our black gondola swayed softly in the same place while the water faintly gurgled under it.  Here and there the reflection of the stars and the lights on the bank quivered and trembled.  Not far from us in a gondola, hung with coloured lanterns which were reflected in the water, there were people singing.  The sounds of guitars, of violins, of mandolins, of men’s and women’s voices, were audible in the dark.  Zinaida Fyodorovna, pale, with a grave, almost stern face, was sitting beside me, compressing her lips and clenching her hands.  She was thinking about something; she did not stir an eyelash, nor hear me.  Her face, her attitude, and her fixed, expressionless gaze, and her incredibly miserable, dreadful, and icy-cold memories, and around her the gondolas, the lights, the music, the song with its vigorous passionate cry of “Jam-mo!  Jam-mo!”—­what contrasts in life!  When she sat like that, with tightly clasped hands, stony, mournful, I used to feel as though we were both characters in some novel in the old-fashioned style called “The Ill-fated,” “The Abandoned,” or something of the sort.  Both of us:  she—­the ill-fated, the abandoned; and I—­the faithful, devoted friend, the dreamer, and, if you like it, a superfluous man, a failure capable of nothing but coughing and dreaming, and perhaps sacrificing myself.

But who and what needed my sacrifices now?  And what had I to sacrifice, indeed?

When we came in in the evening we always drank tea in her room and talked.  We did not shrink from touching on old, unhealed wounds—­ on the contrary, for some reason I felt a positive pleasure in telling her about my life at Orlov’s, or referring openly to relations which I knew and which could not have been concealed from me.

“At moments I hated you,” I said to her.  “When he was capricious, condescending, told you lies, I marvelled how it was you did not see, did not understand, when it was all so clear!  You kissed his hands, you knelt to him, you flattered him. . .”

“When I . . . kissed his hands and knelt to him, I loved him . . .” she said, blushing crimson.

“Can it have been so difficult to see through him?  A fine sphinx!  A sphinx indeed—­a kammer-junker! I reproach you for nothing, God forbid,” I went on, feeling I was coarse, that I had not the tact, the delicacy which are so essential when you have to do with a fellow-creature’s soul; in early days before I knew her I had not noticed this defect in myself.  “But how could you fail to see what he was,” I went on, speaking more softly and more diffidently, however.