Soon afterwards I, too, had a letter from her, also scented and literary.  She wrote that she had missed me, missed my beautiful, intelligent, loving eyes.  She reproached me affectionately for wasting my youth, for stagnating in the country when I might, like her, be living in paradise under the palms, breathing the fragrance of the orange-trees.  And she signed herself “Your forsaken Ariadne.”  Two days later came another letter in the same style, signed “Your forgotten Ariadne.”  My mind was confused.  I loved her passionately, I dreamed of her every night, and then this “your forsaken,” “your forgotten”—­what did it mean?  What was it for?  And then the dreariness of the country, the long evenings, the disquieting thoughts of Lubkov. . . .  The uncertainty tortured me, and poisoned my days and nights; it became unendurable.  I could not bear it and went abroad.

Ariadne summoned me to Abbazzia.  I arrived there on a bright warm day after rain; the rain-drops were still hanging on the trees and glistening on the huge, barrack-like dependance where Ariadne and Lubkov were living.

They were not at home.  I went into the park; wandered about the avenues, then sat down.  An Austrian General, with his hands behind him, walked past me, with red stripes on his trousers such as our generals wear.  A baby was wheeled by in a perambulator and the wheels squeaked on the damp sand.  A decrepit old man with jaundice passed, then a crowd of Englishwomen, a Catholic priest, then the Austrian General again.  A military band, only just arrived from Fiume, with glittering brass instruments, sauntered by to the bandstand—­they began playing.

Have you ever been at Abbazzia?  It’s a filthy little Slav town with only one street, which stinks, and in which one can’t walk after rain without goloshes.  I had read so much and always with such intense feeling about this earthly paradise that when afterwards, holding up my trousers, I cautiously crossed the narrow street, and in my ennui bought some hard pears from an old peasant woman who, recognising me as a Russian, said:  “Tcheeteery” for “tchetyry” (four)—­“davadtsat” for “dvadtsat” (twenty), and when I wondered in perplexity where to go and what to do here, and when I inevitably met Russians as disappointed as I was, I began to feel vexed and ashamed.  There is a calm bay there full of steamers and boats with coloured sails.  From there I could see Fiume and the distant islands covered with lilac mist, and it would have been picturesque if the view over the bay had not been hemmed in by the hotels and their dependances—­buildings in an absurd, trivial style of architecture, with which the whole of that green shore has been covered by greedy money grubbers, so that for the most part you see nothing in this little paradise but windows, terraces, and little squares with tables and waiters black coats.  There is a park such as you find now in every watering-place abroad.  And the dark, motionless, silent foliage of the palms, and the bright yellow sand in the avenue, and the bright green seats, and the glitter of the braying military horns—­all this sickened me in ten minutes!  And yet one is obliged for some reason to spend ten days, ten weeks, there!