he snatched up a knife and with it scraped over his very best sketch.  After his tea he sat plunged in gloom at the window and gazed at the Volga.  And now the Volga was dingy, all of one even colour without a gleam of light, cold-looking.  Everything, everything recalled the approach of dreary, gloomy autumn.  And it seemed as though nature had removed now from the Volga the sumptuous green covers from the banks, the brilliant reflections of the sunbeams, the transparent blue distance, and all its smart gala array, and had packed it away in boxes till the coming spring, and the crows were flying above the Volga and crying tauntingly, “Bare, bare!”

Ryabovsky heard their cawing, and thought he had already gone off and lost his talent, that everything in this world was relative, conditional, and stupid, and that he ought not to have taken up with this woman....  In short, he was out of humour and depressed.

Olga Ivanovna sat behind the screen on the bed, and, passing her fingers through her lovely flaxen hair, pictured herself first in the drawing-room, then in the bedroom, then in her husband’s study; her imagination carried her to the theatre, to the dress-maker, to her distinguished friends.  Were they getting something up now?  Did they think of her?  The season had begun by now, and it would be time to think about her “At Homes.”  And Dymov?  Dear Dymov! with what gentleness and childlike pathos he kept begging her in his letters to make haste and come home!  Every month he sent her seventy-five roubles, and when she wrote him that she had lent the artists a hundred roubles, he sent that hundred too.  What a kind, generous-hearted man!  The travelling wearied Olga Ivanovna; she was bored; and she longed to get away from the peasants, from the damp smell of the river, and to cast off the feeling of physical uncleanliness of which she was conscious all the time, living in the peasants’ huts and wandering from village to village.  If Ryabovsky had not given his word to the artists that he would stay with them till the twentieth of September, they might have gone away that very day.  And how nice that would have been!

“My God!” moaned Ryabovsky.  “Will the sun ever come out?  I can’t go on with a sunny landscape without the sun....”

“But you have a sketch with a cloudy sky,” said Olga Ivanovna, coming from behind the screen.  “Do you remember, in the right foreground forest trees, on the left a herd of cows and geese?  You might finish it now.”

“Aie!” the artist scowled.  “Finish it!  Can you imagine I am such a fool that I don’t know what I want to do?”

“How you have changed to me!” sighed Olga Ivanovna.

“Well, a good thing too!”

Olga Ivanovna’s face quivered; she moved away to the stove and began to cry.

“Well, that’s the last straw—­crying!  Give over!  I have a thousand reasons for tears, but I am not crying.”

“A thousand reasons!” cried Olga Ivanovna.  “The chief one is that you are weary of me.  Yes!” she said, and broke into sobs.  “If one is to tell the truth, you are ashamed of our love.  You keep trying to prevent the artists from noticing it, though it is impossible to conceal it, and they have known all about it for ever so long.”