“I respect and understand your tears and your sorrow,” said Raisky, stifling his own tears.
“You are my kind old comrade. Even at school you never laughed at me, and do you know why I weep?”
Leonti took a letter from his desk and handed it to Raisky. It was the letter from Juliana Andreevna of which Tatiana Markovna had spoken. Raisky glanced through it.
“Destroy it,” he said. “You will have no peace while it is in your possession.”
“Destroy it!” said Leonti, seizing the letter, and replacing it in the desk. “How is it possible to think of such a thing, when these are the only lines she has written me, and these are all that I have as a souvenir?”
“Leonti! Think of all this as a malady, a terrible misfortune, and don’t succumb to it. You are not an old man, and have a long life before you.”
“My life is over, unless she returns to me,” he whispered.
“What! You could, you would take her back!”
“You, too, Boris, fail to understand me!” cried Leonti in despair, as he thrust his hands into his hair and strode up and down. “People keep on saying I am ill, they offer sympathy, bring a doctor, sit all night by my bedside, and yet don’t guess why I suffer so wildly, don’t even guess at the only remedy there is for me. She is not here,” he whispered wildly, seizing Raisky by the shoulders and shaking him violently. “She is not here, and that is what constitutes my illness. Besides, I am not ill, I am dead. Take me to her, and I shall rise again. And you ask whether I will take her back again! You, a novelist, don’t understand simple things like that!”
“I did not know that you loved her like that,” said Raisky tenderly. “You used to laugh and say that you had got so used to her that you were becoming faithless to your Greeks and Romans.”