»My father is a doctor in the military service. My grandfather was a peasant. We are old-ritualists.«

Liuba, surprised, looked up at him.

»Really? But you don't wear a cross round your neck.«

»A cross!« he laughed. »We wear our cross on our backs.«

The girl frowned slightly.

»You want to go to sleep? You'd better lie down than waste time in this way.«

»No, I won't lie down. I don't want to sleep any more.«

»As you wish.«

There was a long and awkward silence. Liuba gazed downwards and fixed her attention on turning a ring on her finger. He looked round the room; each time be conspicuously avoided meeting the girl's glance, and rested his eyes on the unfinished glass of cognac. Then, all at once, it became overwhelmingly clear to him, even palpably evident, that all this was no longer what it seemed—that little yellow glass with the cognac, the girl so absorbed in twiddling her ring—and he himself, too, he was no longer himself, but someone else, someone alien and quite apart.... Just then the music stopped and there followed a quiet jingle of spurs.... He seemed to himself to have lived at some time, not in this house, but in a place very much like it; and that he had been an active and even important person to whom something was now happening. That strange feeling was so powerful that he shuddered and shook his head; and the feeling soon left him, but not altogether; there remained some faint inexpungible trace of the turbulent memories of that which had never been. And quite often, in the course of this unusual night, he caught himself at a point whence he was looking down on some object or person, trying anxiously to recall them out of the deep darkness of the past, even out of what had never existed.

Had he not known it for a thing impossible, he would have said that he had already been here on some occasion, so familiar and habitual had it all become. And this was unpleasant; it had already imperceptibly estranged him from himself and his comrades, and mysteriously made him a part of this institution, part of its wild and loathesome life.