“Why all these tragic airs?” he asked. Unconsciously allured by their beauty of outline, he glanced at her soft shoulders and exquisitely moulded arms. Her gesture of helplessness and despair made him feel sure of his superiority. It was as if they were being weighed in scales, one sinking when the other rose. Sarudine felt a cruel pleasure in knowing that this girl whom instinctively he had considered superior to himself was now made to suffer through him. In the first stage of their intimacy he had feared her. Now she had been brought to shame and dishonour; at which he was glad. He grew softer. Gently he took her strengthless hands in his, and drew her closer to him. His senses were roused; his breath came quicker. “Never mind! It’ll be all right! There is nothing so dreadful about it, after all!” “So you think, eh?” replied Lida scornfully. It was scorn that helped her to recover herself, and she gazed at him with strange intensity. “Why, of course I do,” said Sarudine, attempting to embrace her in a way that he knew to be effective. But she remained cold and lifeless. “Come, now, why are you so cross, my pretty one?” he murmured in a gentle tone of reproof. “Let me go! Let me go, I say!” exclaimed Lida, as she shook him off. Sarudine felt physically hurt that his passion should have been roused in vain. “Women are the very devil!” he thought. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked testily, and his face flushed. As if the question had brought something to her mind, she suddenly covered her face with both hands and burst into tears. She wept just as peasant-women weep, sobbing loudly, her face buried in her hands, her body being bent forward, while her dishevelled hair drooped over her wet, distorted countenance. Sarudine was utterly nonplussed. He smiled, though yet afraid that this might give offence, and tried to pull away her hands from her face. Lida stubbornly resisted, weeping all the while. “Oh! my God!” he exclaimed. He longed to shout at her, to wrench her hands aside, to call her hard names. “What are you whining for like this? You’ve gone wrong with me, worse luck, and there it is! Why all this weeping just to-day? For heaven’s sake, stop!” Speaking thus roughly, he caught hold of her hand. The jerk caused her head to oscillate to and fro. She suddenly stopped crying, and removed her hands from her tear-stained face, looking up at him in childish fear. A crazy thought flashed through her mind that anybody might strike her now. But Sarudine’s manner again softened, and he said in a consoling voice: “Come, my Lidotschka, don’t cry any more! You’re to blame, as well! Why make a scene? You’ve lost a lot, I know; but, still, we had so much happiness, too, didn’t we? And we must just forget….” Lida began to sob once more. “Oh! stop it, do!” he shouted. Then he walked across the room, nervously pulling his moustache, and his lips quivered.