“My dear, my dear, do be friends with Lubkov.  He is so unhappy!  His wife and mother are simply awful.”

She used the formal mode of address in speaking to Lubkov, and when she was going up to bed she said good-night to him exactly as she did to me, and their rooms were on different floors.  All this made me hope that it was all nonsense, and that there was no sort of love affair between them, and I felt at ease when I met him.  And when one day he asked me for the loan of three hundred roubles, I gave it to him with the greatest pleasure.

Every day we spent in enjoying ourselves and in nothing but enjoying ourselves; we strolled in the park, we ate, we drank.  Every day there were conversations with the Russian family.  By degrees I got used to the fact that if I went into the park I should be sure to meet the old man with jaundice, the Catholic priest, and the Austrian General, who always carried a pack of little cards, and wherever it was possible sat down and played patience, nervously twitching his shoulders.  And the band played the same thing over and over again.

At home in the country I used to feel ashamed to meet the peasants when I was fishing or on a picnic party on a working day; here too I was ashamed at the sight of the footmen, the coachmen, and the workmen who met us.  It always seemed to me they were looking at me and thinking:  “Why are you doing nothing?” And I was conscious of this feeling of shame every day from morning to night.  It was a strange, unpleasant, monotonous time; it was only varied by Lubkov’s borrowing from me now a hundred, now fifty guldens, and being suddenly revived by the money as a morphia-maniac is by morphia, beginning to laugh loudly at his wife, at himself, at his creditors.

At last it began to be rainy and cold.  We went to Italy, and I telegraphed to my father begging him for mercy’s sake to send me eight hundred roubles to Rome.  We stayed in Venice, in Bologna, in Florence, and in every town invariably put up at an expensive hotel, where we were charged separately for lights, and for service, and for heating, and for bread at lunch, and for the right of having dinner by ourselves.  We ate enormously.  In the morning they gave us cafe complet; at one o’clock lunch:  meat, fish, some sort of omelette, cheese, fruits, and wine.  At six o’clock dinner of eight courses with long intervals, during which we drank beer and wine.  At nine o’clock tea.  At midnight Ariadne would declare she was hungry, and ask for ham and boiled eggs.  We would eat to keep her company.

In the intervals between meals we used to rush about the museums and exhibitions in continual anxiety for fear we should be late for dinner or lunch.  I was bored at the sight of the pictures; I longed to be at home to rest; I was exhausted, looked about for a chair and hypocritically repeated after other people:  “How exquisite, what atmosphere!” Like overfed boa constrictors, we noticed only the most glaring objects.  The shop windows hypnotised us; we went into ecstasies over imitation brooches and bought a mass of useless trumpery.