be captivated like me and to respond with the same love. It was so
poetical!

But she was incapable of really loving as I did, for she was cold
and already somewhat corrupted. There was a demon in her, whispering
to her day and night that she was enchanting, adorable; and, having
no definite idea for what object she was created, or for what purpose
life had been given her, she never pictured herself in the future
except as very wealthy and distinguished, she had visions of balls,
races, liveries, of sumptuous drawing-rooms, of a salon of her own,
and of a perfect swarm of counts, princes, ambassadors, celebrated
painters and artists, all of them adoring her and in ecstasies over
her beauty and her dresses. . . .

This thirst for personal success, and this continual concentration
of the mind in one direction, makes people cold, and Ariadne was
cold--to me, to nature, and to music. Meanwhile time was passing,
and still there were no ambassadors on the scene. Ariadne went on
living with her brother, the spiritualist: things went from bad to
worse, so that she had nothing to buy hats and dresses with, and
had to resort to all sorts of tricks and dodges to conceal her
poverty.

As luck would have it, a certain Prince Maktuev, a wealthy man but
an utterly insignificant person, had paid his addresses to her when
she was living at her aunt's in Moscow. She had refused him,
point-blank. But now she was fretted by the worm of repentance that
she had refused him; just as a peasant pouts with repulsion at a
mug of kvass with cockroaches in it but yet drinks it, so she frowned
disdainfully at the recollection of the prince, and yet she would