“A depraved woman is like a swine,” Doctor Pavel Ivanovich said to me. “If you set her down to table she puts her legs on it.”
But his explanation was too simple. Nobody could be more infatuated with Olga than I was, and I was the first to be ready to throw stones at her; still, the uneasy voice of truth whispered to me that this was not push nor the swagger of a prosperous and satisfied woman, but the despairing presentiment of the near and inevitable catastrophe.
We were returning from the shoot to which we had gone early in the morning. The sport had been bad. Near the marshes, on which we had set great hopes, we met a party of sportsmen, who told us the game was wild. Three woodcocks and one duckling was all the game we were able to send to the other world as the whole result of ten guns. At last one of the lady riders had an attack of toothache and we were obliged to hurry back. We returned along a good road that passed through the fields on which the sheaves of newly reaped rye were looking yellow against the background of the dark, gloomy forests.… Near the horizon the church and houses of the Count's estate gleamed white. To their right the mirror-like surface of the lake stretched out wide, and to the left the “Stone Grave” rose darkly.…
“What a terrible woman!” Nadinka whispered to me every time Olga came up to our wagonette. “What a terrible woman! She's as bad as she's pretty!… How long ago is it since you were best man at her wedding? She has not had time to wear out her wedding shoes, and she is already wearing another man's silk and is flaunting in another man's diamonds. If she has such instincts it would have been more tactful had she waited a year or two.…”
“She's in a hurry to live! She has no time to wait!” I sighed.
“Do you know what has become of her husband?”
“I hear he is drinking.…”
“Yes.… The day before yesterday father was in town and saw him driving in a droshky. His head was hanging to one side, he was without a hat, and his face was dirty.… He's a lost man! He's terribly poor, I hear; they have nothing to eat, the flat is not paid for. Poor little Sasha is for days without food. Father described all this to the Count.… You know the Count! He is honest, kind, but he is not fond of thinking about anything, or reasoning. ‘I'll send him a hundred roubles,’ he said. And he did it at once. I don't think he could have insulted Urbenin more than by sending this money.… He'll feel insulted by the Count's gift and will drink all the more.”
“Yes, the Count is stupid,” I said. “He might have sent him the money through me, and in my name.”
“He had no right to send him money! Have I the right to feed you if I am strangling you, and you hate me?”