we all flung into the world only to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and each other? Schoolboys coming - laughing - Seriozha?' she thought. `I thought, too, that I loved him, and used to be touched by my own tenderness. But I have lived without him, I gave him up for another love, and did not regret the exchange till that love was satisfied.' And with loathing she thought of what she meant by that love. And the clearness with which she saw life now, her own and all men's was a pleasure to her. `It's so with me and Piotr, and Fiodor the coachman, and that merchant, and all the people living along the Volga, where those placards invite one to go, and everywhere and always,' she thought when she had driven under the low-pitched roof of the Nizhny-Novgorod station and the porters ran to meet her.

`A ticket to Obiralovka?' said Piotr.

She had utterly forgotten where and why she was going, and only by a great effort she understood the question.

`Yes,' she said, handing him her purse, and, taking a little red bag in her hand, she got out of the carriage.

Making her way through the crowd to the first-class waiting room, she gradually recollected all the details of her position, and the plans between which she was hesitating. And again at the old sore places, hope and then despair scraped the wounds of her tortured, fearfully throbbing heart. As she sat on the star- shaped sofa waiting for the train, she gazed with aversion at the people coming and going (they were all hateful to her), and thought how she would arrive at the station, would write him a note, and what she would write to him, and how he was at this moment complaining to his mother of his position, not understanding her sufferings, and how she would go into the room, and what she would say to him. Then she thought that life might still be happy, and how miserably she loved and hated him, and how fearfully her heart was beating.