world--solitude. . . . It's too much of a good thing. . . . You
only want Circassians with daggers to complete it."

"I am not telling you a tale, but fact."

"Well, even if it is a fact . . . it all proves nothing, and there
is nothing new in it. . . ."

"Wait a little before you find fault! Let me finish," said Ananyev,
waving his hand with vexation; "don't interfere, please! I am not
telling you, but the doctor. . . . Well," he went on, addressing
me and glancing askance at the student who bent over his books and
seemed very well satisfied at having gibed at the engineer--"well,
Kisotchka was not surprised or frightened at seeing me. It seemed
as though she had known beforehand that she would find me in the
summer-house. She was breathing in gasps and trembling all over as
though in a fever, while her tear-stained face, so far as I could
distinguish it as I struck match after match, was not the intelligent,
submissive weary face I had seen before, but something different,
which I cannot understand to this day. It did not express pain, nor
anxiety, nor misery--nothing of what was expressed by her words
and her tears. . . . I must own that, probably because I did not
understand it, it looked to me senseless and as though she were
drunk.

"'I can't bear it,' muttered Kisotchka in the voice of a crying
child. 'It's too much for me, Nikolay Anastasyitch. Forgive me,
Nikolav Anastasyitch. I can't go on living like this. . . . I am
going to the town to my mother's. . . . Take me there. . . . Take
me there, for God's sake!'