I. Yalta

People were saying that a new face had appeared on the sea front: a lady with a dog. Dmitri Dmitrich Gurov, who had been in Yalta a fortnight and had grown used to it, had also begun to take an interest in new faces. Sitting in the pavilion at Vernet's, he saw a young woman, not tall, fair-haired, in a beret, walking along the front; behind her ran a white Pomeranian.

And afterwards he met her several times a day, in the public gardens and in the square. She walked alone, always in the same beret, with the white dog; no one knew who she was, and they called her simply the lady with the dog.

"If she's here without her husband, and without friends," Gurov reasoned, "it wouldn't be a bad thing to make her acquaintance."

He was not yet forty, but he already had a daughter of twelve and two sons at school. He had been married young, when he was a second-year student, and his wife now seemed half as old again as he was. She was a tall woman with dark eyebrows, upright, dignified, solemn, and, as she called herself, a thinking woman. She read a great deal, used the new spelling, called her husband not Dmitri but Dimitri; and he privately thought her narrow, stiff, inelegant, was afraid of her, and did not like being at home. He had begun being unfaithful to her long ago, and was unfaithful often, and that was probably why he nearly always spoke badly of women; when they were discussed in his presence, he called them "the lower race."

The "new spelling" was a reformed Russian orthography, then favoured by progressive people.

It seemed to him that he had been taught enough by bitter experience to call them what he liked, and yet he could not have lived two days without "the lower race." In the company of men he was bored, ill at ease, silent and cold; but among women he felt free, and knew what to talk to them about and how to behave; and even to be silent with them was easy. In his appearance, in his character, in his whole nature there was something attractive and elusive, which drew women to him; he knew it, and some force drew him to them too.

Repeated experience, and bitter experience at that, had long taught him that every intimacy, which at first gives such a pleasant variety to life and seems so charming and light an adventure, inevitably grows, among decent people — especially Moscow people, who are so slow and irresolute — into an extremely complicated problem, and the situation at last becomes burdensome. But at every new meeting with an interesting woman this experience somehow slipped from his memory, and he wanted to live, and everything seemed so simple and amusing.

And so one evening he was dining in the public gardens, and the lady in the beret came up slowly to take the next table. Her expression, her walk, her dress, her hair told him that she was a lady, that she was married, that she was in Yalta for the first time and alone, and that she was bored here . . . He beckoned the Pomeranian, and when it came up he shook his finger at it. The Pomeranian growled. Gurov shook his finger again.

The lady glanced at him and at once lowered her eyes.

"He doesn't bite," she said, and blushed.

"May I give him a bone?" — and when she nodded, he asked pleasantly: "Have you been in Yalta long?"

"About five days."

"And I'm dragging out my second week here."

They were silent for a little.

"Time passes quickly, and yet it's so dull here!" she said, not looking at him.

"It's only the fashion to say it's dull here. A man lives in his Belyov or Zhizdra and isn't bored, and then he comes here: 'Oh, how dull! Oh, the dust!' You'd think he'd come from Granada."

She laughed. Then they went on eating in silence, like strangers; but after dinner they walked together, and a light, joking talk began, the talk of free, contented people who don't care where they go or what they talk about. They walked and talked of how strange the light was on the sea; the water was a soft, warm lilac colour, and the moon laid a golden strip across it. They talked of how close it was after the hot day. Gurov told her that he was a Muscovite, that he had studied literature but worked in a bank; that he had once trained to sing in an opera but given it up; that he owned two houses in Moscow . . . And from her he learned that she had grown up in Petersburg, but had married in S., where she had now been living for two years; that she would be in Yalta about a month more, and that perhaps her husband, who also wanted a holiday, would come for her. She could not explain at all whether her husband served in the provincial administration or on the district council, and this amused her herself. And Gurov learned that her name was Anna Sergeyevna.

Afterwards, in his room at the hotel, he thought about her; that they would certainly meet tomorrow. It had to be so. Going to bed, he remembered that only lately she had been a schoolgirl, studying just as his daughter was now; he remembered how much shyness and awkwardness there still was in her laugh, in her talk with a stranger — she must be alone like this for the first time in her life . . . He remembered her thin, weak neck, her beautiful grey eyes.

"There's something pathetic about her, all the same," he thought, and fell asleep.