‘To be sure there was. Only fancy; she had to appear on the stage that very day, and she acted her part. She took a glass of poison to the theatre with her, drank it before the first act, and went through all that act afterwards. With the poison inside her! Isn’t that something like strength of will? Character, eh? And, they say, she never acted her part with such feeling, such passion! The public suspected nothing, they clapped, and called for her.... And directly the curtain fell, she dropped down there, on the stage. Convulsions ... and convulsions, and within an hour she was dead! But didn’t I tell you all about it? And it was in the papers too!’ Aratov’s hands had grown suddenly cold, and he felt an inward shiver. ‘No, you didn’t tell me that,’ he said at last. ‘And you don’t know what play it was? Kupfer thought a minute. ‘I did hear what the play was ... there is a betrayed girl in it.... Some drama, it must have been. Clara was created for dramatic parts.... Her very appearance ... But where are you off to?’ Kupfer interrupted himself, seeing that Aratov was reaching after his hat. ‘I don’t feel quite well,’ replied Aratov. ‘Good-bye ... I’ll come in another time.’ Kupfer stopped him and looked into his face. ‘What a nervous fellow you are, my boy! Just look at yourself.... You’re as white as chalk.’ ‘I’m not well,’ repeated Aratov, and, disengaging himself from Kupfer’s detaining hands, he started homewards. Only at that instant it became clear to him that he had come to Kupfer with the sole object of talking of Clara... ‘Unhappy Clara, poor frantic Clara....’ On reaching home, however, he quickly regained his composure to a certain degree. The circumstances accompanying Clara’s death had at first given him a violent shock ... but later on this performance ‘with the poison inside her,’ as Kupfer had expressed it, struck him as a kind of monstrous pose, a piece of bravado, and he was already trying not to think about it, fearing to arouse a feeling in himself, not unlike repugnance. And at dinner, as he sat facing Platosha, he suddenly recalled her midnight appearance, recalled that abbreviated dressing-jacket, the cap with the high ribbon--and why a ribbon on a nightcap?--all the ludicrous apparition which, like the scene-shifter’s whistle in a transformation scene, had dissolved all his visions into dust! He even forced Platosha to repeat her description of how she had heard his scream, had been alarmed, had jumped up, could not for a minute find either his door or her own, and so on. In the evening he played a game of cards with her, and went off to his room rather depressed, but again fairly composed.