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White Army] says they behaved like downright cads in Odessa during the evacuation.” At the same time she considers the English type of face to be (after mine) the handsomest on earth; respects Germans because they are musical and steady; and declares she adores Paris, where we once happened to spend a few days. These opinions of hersstand as stiff as statues in their niches. On the contrary, her position in respect to the Russian folk has, on the whole, undergone a certain evolution. In 1920 she was still saying: “The genuine Russian peasant is a monarchist”; now she says: “The genuine Russian peasant is extinct.”
    She is little educated and little observant. We discovered one day that to her the term “mystic” was somehow dimly connected with “mist” and “mistake” and “stick,” but that she had not the least idea what a mystic really was. The only kind of tree she is capable of identifying is the birch: reminds her of her native woodland, she says.
    She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer descriptions. She goes for her books to a Russian library; there she seats herself down and is a long time choosing; fumbles at books on the table; takes one, turns its pages, peers into it sideways, like an investigative hen; puts it away, takes up another, opens it—all of which is performed on the table’s surface and with the help of one hand only; she notices that she has opened the book upside down, whereupon it is given a turn of ninety degrees—not more, for she discards it to make a dash at the volume which the librarian is about to offer to another lady; the whole process lasts more than an hour, and I do not know what prompts her final selection. Perhaps the title.
    Once I brought back from a railway journey some rotten detective novel with a crimson spider amid a black web on its cover. She dipped into it and found it terribly thrilling—felt that she simply could not help taking a peep at the end, but as that would spoil everything, she shut her eyes tight and tore the book in two down its back and hid the second, concluding, portion; then, later, she forgot the place and wasa long, long time searching the house for the criminal she herself had concealed, repeating the while in a small voice: “It was so exciting, so terribly exciting; I know I shall die if I don’t find out—”
    She has found out now. Those pages that explained everything were securely hidden; still, they were found—all of them except one, perhaps. Indeed, a lot of things have happened; now duly explained. Also that came to pass which she feared most. Of all omens it was the weirdest. A shattered mirror. Yes, it did happen, although not quite in the ordinary way. The poor dead woman.
    Tum-tee-tum. And once more—TUM! No, I have not gone mad. I am merely producing gleeful little sounds. The kind of glee one experiences upon making an April fool of someone. And a damned good fool I
have
made of someone. Who is he? Gentle reader, look at yourself in the mirror, as you seem to like mirrors so much.
    And now, all of a sudden I feel sad—the real thing, this time. I have just visualized, with shocking vividness, that cactus on the balcony, those blue rooms, that flat of ours in one of those newfangled houses built in the modern boxlike, space-cheating, let-us-have-no-nonsense style. And there, in my world of neatness and cleanliness, the disorder Lydia spread, the sweet vulgar tang of her perfume. But her faults, her innocent dullness, her school-dormitory habit of having the giggles in bed, did not really annoy me. We never quarreled, never did I make a single complaint to her—no matter what piffle she spouted in public, or how tastelessly she dressed. She was anything but good at distinguishing shades, poor soul. She thought it just right if the main colors matched, this satisfying thoroughly her sense of tone, and so she would flaunt a hat of grass-green felt with an