I felt ashamed of my emotion, of my trembling.  And I was afraid I might begin sobbing, too!  I went out without saying another word, and within an hour I was sitting in the train.  All the journey, for some reason, I imagined Ariadne with child, and she seemed disgusting to me, and all the women I saw in the trains and at the stations looked to me, for some reason, as if they too were with child, and they too seemed disgusting and pitiable.  I was in the position of a greedy, passionate miser who should suddenly discover that all his gold coins were false.  The pure, gracious images which my imagination, warmed by love, had cherished for so long, my plans, my hopes, my memories, my ideas of love and of woman—­all now were jeering and putting out their tongues at me.  “Ariadne,” I kept asking with horror, “that young, intellectual, extraordinarily beautiful girl, the daughter of a senator, carrying on an intrigue with such an ordinary, uninteresting vulgarian?  But why should she not love Lubkov?” I answered myself.  “In what is he inferior to me?  Oh, let her love any one she likes, but why lie to me?  But why is she bound to be open with me?” And so I went on over and over again till I was stupefied.

It was cold in the train; I was travelling first class, but even so there were three on a side, there were no double windows, the outer door opened straight into the compartment, and I felt as though I were in the stocks, cramped, abandoned, pitiful, and my legs were fearfully numb, and at the same time I kept recalling how fascinating she had been that morning in her dressing-jacket and with her hair down, and I was suddenly overcome by such acute jealousy that I leapt up in anguish, so that my neighbours stared at me in wonder and positive alarm.

At home I found deep snow and twenty degrees of frost.  I’m fond of the winter; I’m fond of it because at that time, even in the hardest frosts, it’s particularly snug at home.  It’s pleasant to put on one’s fur jacket and felt overboots on a clear frosty day, to do something in the garden or in the yard, or to read in a well warmed room, to sit in my father’s study before the open fire, to wash in my country bath-house. . . .  Only if there is no mother in the house, no sister and no children, it is somehow dreary on winter evenings, and they seem extraordinarily long and quiet.  And the warmer and snugger it is, the more acutely is this lack felt.  In the winter when I came back from abroad, the evenings were endlessly long, I was intensely depressed, so depressed that I could not even read; in the daytime I was coming and going, clearing away the snow in the garden or feeding the chickens and the calves, but in the evening it was all up with me.