“I chattered, I boasted,” laughed Leonti bitterly, “and was without understanding. But for this I never should have understood. I thought I loved the ancients, while my whole love was given to the living woman. Yes, Boris, I loved books and my gymnasium, the ancients and the moderns, my scholars, and you, Boris; I loved the street, this hedge, the service tree there, only through my love for her. Now, nothing of all this matters. I knew that as I lay on the floor reading her letter. And you ask whether I would receive her. God in Heaven! If she came, how she should be cherished!” he concluded, his tears flowing once more.
“Leonti, I come to you with a request from Tatiana Markovna, who asks you,” he went on, though Leonti walked ceaselessly up and down, dragging his slippers and appeared not to listen, “to come over to us. Here you will die of misery.”
“Thank you,” said Leonti, shaking his head. “She is a saint. But how can a desolate man carry his sorrow into a strange house?”
“Not a strange house, Leonti, we are brothers, and our relation is closer than the ties of blood.”
Leonti lay down on the bed, and took Raisky’s hand.
“Pardon my egoism,” he said. “Later, later, I will come of my own accord, will ask permission to look after your library, if no hope is left me.”
“Have you any hope?”
“What! Do you think there is no hope?”
Raisky, who did not wish to deprive his friend of the last straw, nor to stir useless hope in him, hesitated, before he answered after a pause: “I don’t know what to say to you exactly, Leonti. I know so little of your wife that I cannot judge her character.”
“You know her,” said Leonti in a dull voice. “It was you who directed my attention to the Frenchman, but then I did not understand you, because nothing of the kind had entered my head. But if he leaves her,” he said, with a gleam of hope in his eyes, “she will perhaps remember me.”