At last it stood half-way open, and yesterday’s Carmen-like beauty appeared on the threshold. She wore a lace dressing-gown, and her long, wavy hair hung in heavy coils down her back. The beauty glanced to right and to left along the passage, then turned round with a whispered word, and out of the room issued—Gzhatski! He, too, whispered something, and they both laughed softly. Stepping carefully on tiptoe over the carpet, Sergei Grigorievitch stole towards the staircase, and disappeared round its bend. The beauty closed her door.… Poor Irene’s knees shook, and all but gave way under her. Leaning against the wall, with hardly strength enough to drag one foot before the other, she staggered back to her room, and fell, almost lifeless, on the sofa. The sun had long since risen and was forcing its way in through the shutters. The birds had long been singing, noise and movement were in the air, everywhere people were laughing and talking, but Irene still lay prone and motionless. Thoughts were rushing wildly through her head, but she could not disentangle them. Slowly, gradually, she began to realize the full force of the terrific blow that had fallen on her. “So that is what you are like,” she murmured childishly. “And I had believed in you so completely, and had placed you so high.…” For a moment the voice of reason tried to pacify her. “But this is nothing more than a man’s adventure, a prank, a caprice after a gay supper,” it whispered seriously. But Irene paid no attention. “If it were only the supper,” she argued, “why did not Sergei come to _her_, to his bride? What cared she for marriage ceremonies? Did she not, before God, belong to Gzhatski soul and body? But no, he had not come to her. He considered her old and ugly and repulsive!” This thought filled Irene with such an agony of despair that she slipped from the sofa to the carpet, rolled about and knocked her head against the floor, striving by this means to deaden her unbearable pain. “You are old, you are ridiculous, you are hideous, in spite of your fashionable dresses!” she exclaimed wildly to herself, and, rising from the carpet, she tottered towards the looking-glass, and gazed disgustedly at her own tear-stained, tortured, suddenly aged and disfigured reflection. “So this is the part that has been allotted to you in Sergei’s life!” she hissed. “You are the ideal, the image of his mother, the statue of purity that stands on a pedestal surrounded by respect and homage! I am sick to death of this eternal respect! I want _love_—one month, one day, one hour of _love_! But no—love belongs only to such as Carmen; never will it fall to my lot! Oh! if this is so, if this is so, I do not want to live!”