“It’s all right, it’s all right,” he muttered; “don’t you be frightened!  That tooth would have been no use to you, anyway . . . you must be brave. . .”

And his tobacco-stained fingers, smeared with blood, held up the tooth to her eyes, while the maid approached and put a basin to her mouth.

“You wash out your mouth with cold water when you get home, and that will stop the bleeding,” said Finkel.

He stood before her with the air of a man expecting her to go, waiting to be left in peace.

“Good-day,” she said, turning towards the door.

“Hm! . . . and how about my fee?” enquired Finkel, in a jesting tone.

“Oh, yes!” Vanda remembered, blushing, and she handed the Jew the rouble that had been given her for her ring.

When she got out into the street she felt more overwhelmed with shame than before, but now it was not her poverty she was ashamed of.  She was unconscious now of not having a big hat and a fashionable jacket.  She walked along the street, spitting blood, and brooding on her life, her ugly, wretched life, and the insults she had endured, and would have to endure to-morrow, and next week, and all her life, up to the very day of her death.

“Oh! how awful it is!  My God, how fearful!”

Next day, however, she was back at the “Renaissance,” and dancing there.  She had on an enormous new red hat, a new fashionable jacket, and bronze shoes.  And she was taken out to supper by a young merchant up from Kazan.

A TRIVIAL INCIDENT

IT was a sunny August midday as, in company with a Russian prince who had come down in the world, I drove into the immense so-called Shabelsky pine-forest where we were intending to look for woodcocks.  In virtue of the part he plays in this story my poor prince deserves a detailed description.  He was a tall, dark man, still youngish, though already somewhat battered by life; with long moustaches like a police captain’s; with prominent black eyes, and with the manners of a retired army man.  He was a man of Oriental type, not very intelligent, but straightforward and honest, not a bully, not a fop, and not a rake—­virtues which, in the eyes of the general public, are equivalent to a certificate of being a nonentity and a poor creature.  People generally did not like him (he was never spoken of in the district, except as “the illustrious duffer").  I personally found the poor prince extremely nice with his misfortunes and failures, which made up indeed his whole life.  First of all he was poor.  He did not play cards, did not drink, had no occupation, did not poke his nose into anything, and maintained a perpetual silence but yet he had somehow succeeded in getting through thirty to forty thousand roubles left him at his father’s death.  God only knows what had become of the money.  All that I can say is that owing to lack of supervision a great deal was stolen by stewards,