He took an English dictionary, and translating the words, and guessing their meaning, by degrees he put together the following sentence:  “I drink to the health of my beloved darling, and kiss her little foot a thousand times, and am impatiently expecting her arrival.”  He pictured the pitiable, ludicrous part he would play if he had agreed to go to Nice with his wife.  He felt so mortified that he almost shed tears and began pacing to and fro through all the rooms of the flat in great agitation.  His pride, his plebeian fastidiousness, was revolted.  Clenching his fists and scowling with disgust, he wondered how he, the son of a village priest, brought up in a clerical school, a plain, straightforward man, a surgeon by profession—­how could he have let himself be enslaved, have sunk into such shameful bondage to this weak, worthless, mercenary, low creature.

“’Little foot’!” he muttered to himself, crumpling up the telegram; “’little foot’!”

Of the time when he fell in love and proposed to her, and the seven years that he had been living with her, all that remained in his memory was her long, fragrant hair, a mass of soft lace, and her little feet, which certainly were very small, beautiful feet; and even now it seemed as though he still had from those old embraces the feeling of lace and silk upon his hands and face—­and nothing more.  Nothing more—­that is, not counting hysterics, shrieks, reproaches, threats, and lies—­brazen, treacherous lies.  He remembered how in his father’s house in the village a bird would sometimes chance to fly in from the open air into the house and would struggle desperately against the window-panes and upset things; so this woman from a class utterly alien to him had flown into his life and made complete havoc of it.  The best years of his life had been spent as though in hell, his hopes for happiness shattered and turned into a mockery, his health gone, his rooms as vulgar in their atmosphere as a cocotte’s, and of the ten thousand he earned every year he could never save ten roubles to send his old mother in the village, and his debts were already about fifteen thousand.  It seemed that if a band of brigands had been living in his rooms his life would not have been so hopelessly, so irremediably ruined as by the presence of this woman.

He began coughing and gasping for breath.  He ought to have gone to bed and got warm, but he could not.  He kept walking about the rooms, or sat down to the table, nervously fidgeting with a pencil and scribbling mechanically on a paper.

“Trying a pen. . . .  A little foot.”

By five o’clock he grew weaker and threw all the blame on himself.  It seemed to him now that if Olga Dmitrievna had married some one else who might have had a good influence over her—­who knows?—­ she might after all have become a good, straightforward woman.  He was a poor psychologist, and knew nothing of the female heart; besides, he was churlish, uninteresting. . . .