Beyond the window lay the calm, clear moonlit night. Bur for them the
world with all its wealth of colour and sound had vanished; all that
their eyes beheld was a vision of woman in her nude loveliness. Soon
their imagination became so heated that they felt a burning desire to
see Lida, whom now they had dubbed Lidka, by way of being familiar.
Sarudine had the horses harnessed, and they drove to a house situated
on the outskirts of the town.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
A letter sent by Sarudine to Lida on the day following their interview
fell by chance into Maria Ivanovna's hands. It contained a request for
the permission to see her, and awkwardly suggested that sundry matters
might be satisfactorily arranged. Its pages cast, so Maria Ivanovna
thought, an ugly, shameful shadow upon the pure image of her daughter.
In her first perplexity and distress, she remembered her own youth with
its love, its deceptions, and the grievous episodes of her married
life. A long chain of suffering forged by a life based on rigid laws of
morality dragged its slow length along, even to the confines of old
age.
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