THE LADY WITH THE DOG

I

IT was said that a new person had appeared on the sea-front: a lady
with a little dog. Dmitri Dmitritch Gurov, who had by then been a
fortnight at Yalta, and so was fairly at home there, had begun to
take an interest in new arrivals. Sitting in Verney's pavilion, he
saw, walking on the sea-front, a fair-haired young lady of medium
height, wearing a _béret_; a white Pomeranian dog was running behind
her.

And afterwards he met her in the public gardens and in the square
several times a day. She was walking alone, always wearing the same
_béret_, and always with the same white dog; no one knew who she
was, and every one called her simply "the lady with the dog."

"If she is here alone without a husband or friends, it wouldn't be
amiss to make her acquaintance," Gurov reflected.

He was under forty, but he had a daughter already twelve years old,
and two sons at school. He had been married young, when he was a
student in his second year, and by now his wife seemed half as old
again as he. She was a tall, erect woman with dark eyebrows, staid
and dignified, and, as she said of herself, intellectual. She read
a great deal, used phonetic spelling, called her husband, not Dmitri,
but Dimitri, and he secretly considered her unintelligent, narrow,
inelegant, was afraid of her, and did not like to be at home. He
had begun being unfaithful to her long ago--had been unfaithful