her hands folded on her lap.
“I don’t believe that I’ve ever caught you idle before, Vera Michailovna,” I said.
“Oh, I’m glad you’ve come!” She caught my hand with an eagerness very different from her usual calm, quiet greeting. “Sit down. It’s an extraordinary thing. At that very moment I was wishing for you.”
“What is it I can do for you?” I asked. “You know that I would do anything for you.”
“Yes, I know that you would. But—well. You can’t help me because I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”
“That’s very unlike you,” I said.
“Yes, I know it is—and perhaps that’s why I am frightened. It’s so vague; and you know I long ago determined that if I couldn’t define a trouble and have it there in front of me, so that I could strangle it—why I wouldn’t bother about it. But those things are so easy to say.”
She got up and began to walk up and down the room. That again was utterly unlike her, and altogether I seemed to be seeing, this afternoon, some quite new Vera Michailovna, some one more intimate, more personal, more appealing. I realised suddenly that she had never before, at any period of our friendship, asked for my help—not even for my sympathy. She was so strong and reliant and independent, cared so little for the opinion of others, and shut down so closely upon herself her private life, that I could not have imagined her asking help from any one. And of the two of us, she was the man, the strong determined soul, the brave and self-reliant character. It seemed to me ludicrous that she should ask for my help. Nevertheless I was greatly touched.
“I would do anything for you,” I said.
She turned to me, a splendid figure, her head, with its crown of black hair, lifted, her hands on her hips, her eyes gravely regarding me.
“There are three things,” she said, “perhaps all of them nothing. … And yet all of them disturbing. First my husband. He’s beginning to drink again.”
“Drink?” I said; “where can he get it from?”
“I don’t know. I must discover. But it isn’t the actual drinking. Every one in our country drinks if he can. Only what has made my husband break his resolve? He was so proud of it. You know how proud he was. And he lies about it. He says he is not drinking. He never used to lie about anything. That was not one of his faults.”
“Perhaps his inventions,” I suggested.
“Pouf! His inventions! You know better than that, Ivan Andreievitch. No, no. It is something. … He’s not himself. Well, then, secondly, there’s Nina. The other night did you notice anything?”
“Only that she lost her temper. But she’s always doing that.”
“No, it’s more than that. She’s unhappy, and I don’t like the life she’s leading. Always out at cinematographs and theatres and restaurants, and with a lot of boys who mean no harm, I know—but they’re idiotic, they’re no good. … Now, when the war’s like this and the suffering. … To be always at the cinematograph! But I’ve lost my authority over her, Ivan Andreievitch. She doesn’t care any longer what I say to her. Once, and not so long ago, I meant so much to her. She’s changed, she’s harder, more careless, more selfish. You know, Ivan Andreievitch, that Nina’s simply everything to me. I don’t talk about myself, do I? but at least I can say that since—oh, many, many years, she’s been the whole world and more than the whole world to me. Our mother and father were killed in a railway accident coming up from Odessa when Nina was very small, and since then Nina’s been mine—all mine!”
She said that word with sudden passion, flinging it at me with a fierce gesture of her hands. “Do you know what it is to want that something should belong to you, belong entirely to you, and to no one else? I’ve been too proud to say, but I’ve wanted that terribly all my life. I haven’t had children, although I prayed for them, and perhaps now it is as well. But Nina! She’s known she was mine, and, until now, she’s loved to know it. But now she’s escaping from me, and she knows that too, and is ashamed. I think I could bear anything but that sense that she herself has that she’s being wrong—I hate her to be ashamed.”
“Perhaps,” I suggested, “it’s time that she went out into the world now and worked. There are a thousand things that a woman can do.”
“No—not Nina. I’ve spoilt her, perhaps; I don’t know. I always liked to feel that she needed my help. I didn’t want to make her too self-reliant. That was wrong of me, and I shall be punished for it.”
“Speak to her,” I said. “She loves you so much that one word from you to her will be enough.”
“No,” Vera Michailovna said slowly. “It won’t be enough now. A year ago, yes. But now she’s escaping as fast as she can.”
“Perhaps she’s in love with some one,” I suggested.
“No. I should have seen at once if it had been that. I would rather it were that. I think she would come back to me then. No, I suppose that this had to happen. I was foolish to think that it would not. But it leaves one alone—it—”
She pulled herself up at that, regarding me with sudden shyness, as though she would forbid me to hint that she had shown the slightest emotion, or made in any way an appeal for pity.
I was silent, then I said:
“And the third thing, Vera Michailovna?”
“Uncle Alexei is coming back.” That startled me. I felt my heart give one frantic leap.
“Alexei Petrovitch!” I cried. “When? How soon?”
“I don’t know. I’ve had a letter.” She felt in her dress, found the letter and read it through. “Soon, perhaps. He’s leaving the Front for good. He’s disgusted with it all, he says. He’s going to take up his Petrograd practice again.”
“Will he live with you?”
“No. God forbid!”
She felt then, perhaps, that her cry had revealed more than she intended, because she smiled and, trying to speak lightly, said:
“No. We’re old enemies, my uncle and I. We don’t get on. He thinks me sentimental, I think him—but never mind what I think him. He has a bad effect on my husband.”
“A bad effect?” I repeated.
“Yes. He irritates him. He laughs at his inventions, you know.”
I nodded my head. Yes, with my earlier experience of him I could understand that he would do that.
“He’s a cynical, embittered man,” I said. “He believes in nothing and in nobody. And yet he has his fine side—”
“No, he has no fine side,” she interrupted me fiercely. “None. He is a bad man. I’ve known him all my life, and I’m not to be deceived.”
Then in a softer, quieter tone she continued:
“But tell me, Ivan Andreievitch. I’ve wanted
