for love and calling out to longing, was nothing but a travesty of the woman I had loved...

My friend's hands trembled as he emptied a fresh glass into his mouth, and he said:

— I am drunk — I am in the deepest state of drunkenness — but even in this state I do not lose the power to sit in judgment on myself. I am in urgent need to empty what is in my breast.

Sometimes I feel that she is near me. Do you believe in spirits? What nonsense: she believed in nothing. She used to say, "My temple is my body."

She was like a little cat, her thinking at the tip of her nose. If she felt me looking at her she would strike a pose of allurement, or raise her arms coquettishly to set her hair to rights. When she hid her head in my chest she would make movements like the movements of sparrows; and with a refined sensibility she weighed words and gestures — so she knew when to speak, and when to take refuge in silence, and when to bring me a flower as I wrote, and when to smother the sound of her steps...

And all this ended in a single day. The house filled with kinswomen coming and going, whispering and entering her chamber with compresses in their hands, and ice bags, and hot rubber bottles.

I could not believe what was being said. This strong creature, her body pure as clean water — was she the very one moaning upon the bed?

One day the doctor turned the troop of women out of my house and brought me a nurse, and said:

You and she will take turns caring for the patient; there is no need for this army of women.

And I entered my wife's chamber — she had refused to let me see her before that day. She turned her face toward the wall and

began to weep a strangled weep-ing. And strangely, I felt not the least emotion. It was proved to me with clarity that what had been between us was ended!! I looked at her. This ruined skeleton could not be my wife Marusia.

The nurse had dressed her in her

nightclothes, and the room was filled with the smell of cologne struggling against the foul smell of sickness; and for the first time an unconquerable disgust took hold of me — a revulsion from a body that had been my paradise and my bliss.