her tour for a year or two, but she frowned disdainfully and said:

"You're as prudent as an old woman!"

Lubkov was in favour of the tour. He said it could be done very
cheaply, and he, too, would go to Italy and have a rest there from
family life.

I behaved, I confess, as naïvely as a schoolboy.

Not from jealousy, but from a foreboding of something terrible and
extraordinary, I tried as far as possible not to leave them alone
together, and they made fun of me. For instance, when I went in
they would pretend they had just been kissing one another, and so
on. But lo and behold, one fine morning, her plump, white-skinned
brother, the spiritualist, made his appearance and expressed his
desire to speak to me alone.

He was a man without will; in spite of his education and his delicacy
he could never resist reading another person's letter, if it lay
before him on the table. And now he admitted that he had by chance
read a letter of Lubkov's to Ariadne.

"From that letter I learned that she is very shortly going abroad.
My dear fellow, I am very much upset! Explain it to me for goodness'
sake. I can make nothing of it!"

As he said this he breathed hard, breathing straight in my face and
smelling of boiled beef.