change, as long as I was contented with him whom I loved."
And she remembered with disgust what she called that love. And the clearness with which she now saw her own life, as well as the lives of others, delighted her.
"Thus am I, and Piotr and the coachman, Feodor, and that merchant, and all people from here to the Volga, wherever these remarks are applicable .... and everywhere and always," she thought, as the carriage stopped in front of the low-roofed station of the Nizhni Novgorod Railway, and the porters came hurrying out to meet her.
"Shall I book you for Obiralovka?" asked Piotr.
She had entirely forgotten why she had come, and only by a great effort could she understand what he meant.
"Yes," she said, handing him her purse; and, taking her little red bag, she got out of the carriage. As she entered the waiting-room for the first-class passengers with the throng, she reviewed all the details of her situation and the plans between which she was halting. And again hope and despair in alternation irritated the wounds in her tortured, cruelly palpitating heart. As she sat on the stelliform divan waiting for the train, she looked with aversion on the people going and coming,—they were all her enemies,—and thought now of how, when she reached the station, she would write to him, and what she would write, and then how at this very moment he—not thinking of her suffering—was complaining to his mother of his position, and how she would go to his room, and what she would say to him.
The thought that she might yet live happily crossed her brain; and how hard it was to love and hate him at the same time! And, above all, how frightfully her heart was beating!
