autumn. Every week Ariadne sent my father extremely interesting
letters on scented paper, written in an excellent literary style.
It is my opinion that every woman can be a writer. Ariadne described
in great detail how it had not been easy for her to make it up with
her aunt and induce the latter to give her a thousand roubles for
the journey, and what a long time she had spent in Moscow trying
to find an old lady, a distant relation, in order to persuade her
to go with her. Such a profusion of detail suggested fiction, and
I realised, of course, that she had no chaperon with her.

Soon afterwards I, too, had a letter from her, also scented and
literary. She wrote that she had missed me, missed my beautiful,
intelligent, loving eyes. She reproached me affectionately for
wasting my youth, for stagnating in the country when I might, like
her, be living in paradise under the palms, breathing the fragrance
of the orange-trees. And she signed herself "Your forsaken Ariadne."
Two days later came another letter in the same style, signed "Your
forgotten Ariadne." My mind was confused. I loved her passionately,
I dreamed of her every night, and then this "your forsaken," "your
forgotten"--what did it mean? What was it for? And then the
dreariness of the country, the long evenings, the disquieting
thoughts of Lubkov. . . . The uncertainty tortured me, and poisoned
my days and nights; it became unendurable. I could not bear it and
went abroad.

Ariadne summoned me to Abbazzia. I arrived there on a bright warm
day after rain; the rain-drops were still hanging on the trees and
glistening on the huge, barrack-like dépendance where Ariadne and
Lubkov were living.