no guiding principle in life, though he had a dim understanding now what it meant.  Two years before, when he fell in love with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, it seemed to him that he had only to go with her as his wife to the Caucasus, and he would be saved from vulgarity and emptiness; in the same way now, he was convinced that he had only to part from Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and to go to Petersburg, and he would get everything he wanted.

“Run away,” he muttered to himself, sitting up and biting his nails.  “Run away!”

He pictured in his imagination how he would go aboard the steamer and then would have some lunch, would drink some cold beer, would talk on deck with ladies, then would get into the train at Sevastopol and set off.  Hurrah for freedom!  One station after another would flash by, the air would keep growing colder and keener, then the birches and the fir-trees, then Kursk, Moscow. . . .  In the restaurants cabbage soup, mutton with kasha, sturgeon, beer, no more Asiaticism, but Russia, real Russia.  The passengers in the train would talk about trade, new singers, the Franco-Russian entente; on all sides there would be the feeling of keen, cultured, intellectual, eager life. . . .  Hasten on, on!  At last Nevsky Prospect, and Great Morskaya Street, and then Kovensky Place, where he used to live at one time when he was a student, the dear grey sky, the drizzling rain, the drenched cabmen. . . .

“Ivan Andreitch!” some one called from the next room.  “Are you at home?”

“I’m here,” Laevsky responded.  “What do you want?”

“Papers.”

Laevsky got up languidly, feeling giddy, walked into the other room, yawning and shuffling with his slippers.  There, at the open window that looked into the street, stood one of his young fellow-clerks, laying out some government documents on the window-sill.

“One minute, my dear fellow,” Laevsky said softly, and he went to look for the ink; returning to the window, he signed the papers without looking at them, and said:  “It’s hot!”

“Yes.  Are you coming to-day?”

“I don’t think so. . . .  I’m not quite well.  Tell Sheshkovsky that I will come and see him after dinner.”

The clerk went away.  Laevsky lay down on his sofa again and began thinking: 

“And so I must weigh all the circumstances and reflect on them.  Before I go away from here I ought to pay up my debts.  I owe about two thousand roubles.  I have no money. . . .  Of course, that’s not important; I shall pay part now, somehow, and I shall send the rest, later, from Petersburg.  The chief point is Nadyezhda Fyodorovna. . . .  First of all we must define our relations. . . .  Yes.”

A little later he was considering whether it would not be better to go to Samoylenko for advice.