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asked in a startled voice.
    â€œSixty rubles — it’s expensive, you know,” said the enchanted lips.
    Hands that were no less enchanted dropped a piece of red-and-gold brocade, reached under the counter, brought out the miniature. Kostia took it. It was a shock to find his big, grimy fingers holding the little portrait. How alive it was! And how strange! It was the strangeness of it that he felt the most. The little black rectangle framed a blond head crowned with a tiara; alert yet sweet, penetrating yet mild, the eyes were an unfathomable mystery …
    â€œI’ll take it,” Kostia said, to his own surprise.
    He had spoken so quietly, the voice had seemed to come from such depths of his being, that the salesgirl did not dare to protest. She looked furtively to right and left, then murmured:
    â€œDon’t say anything … I’ll make out the slip for fifty rubles. Just don’t let the cashier see what it is when you pay for it.”
    Kostia thanked her. But he hardly saw her. “Fifty or seventy — what do I care, girl? The price has nothing to do with it — can’t you see that?” A fire burned in him. As he walked homeward he felt the little ebony rectangle in his inside coat pocket cling gently to his breast; and from the contact there radiated a growing joy. He walked faster and faster, ran up a dark flight of stairs, hurried down the hall of the collective apartment — today it smelled rankly of naphthaline and cabbage soup — entered his room, switched on the light, looked ecstatically at his cot bed, the old illustrated magazines piled on the table, the window with the three broken panes replaced by cardboard — and felt embarrassed to hear himself murmur: “What luck!” Now the little black frame stood on the table, tilted against the wall, and the blond woman saw only him, as he saw only her. The room filled with an indefinable brightness. Kostia walked aimlessly from the window to the door — suddenly he felt imprisoned. On the other side of the partition Romachkin coughed softly.
    â€œWhat a man!” Kostia thought, suddenly amused by the recollection of the bilious little fellow. He never went out, he was so neat and clean — a real petit bourgeois , living there alone with his geraniums, his gray-paper-bound books, his portraits of great men: Ibsen, who said that the solitary man is the strongest man; Mechnikov, who enlarged the boundaries of life; Darwin, who proved that animals of the same species do not eat each other; Knut Hamsun, because he spoke for the hungry and loved the forest. Romachkin still wore old coats made in the days of the war that preceded the revolution that preceded the Civil War — in the days when the world swarmed with inoffensive and frightened Romachkins. Kostia gave a little smile as he turned toward his half-a-fireplace — because the partition which separated his room from Assistant Clerk Romachkin’s room exactly divided the handsome marble fireplace of what had once been a drawing room.
    Poor old Romachkin! you’ll never have any more than half a room, half a fireplace, half a life — and not even half of a face like that …
    (The face in the miniature, the intoxicating blue light of those eyes.)
    â€œYour half of life is the dark half, poor old Romachkin.”
    Two strides took Kostia into the hall and to his neighbor’s door, on which he rapped the customary three little knocks. A stale odor of fried food, mingled with talk and quarreling voices, wafted from the other end of the apartment. An angry woman — who was certainly thin, embittered, and unhappy — was clattering pots and saying: “So he said, ‘Very well, citizen, I’ll tell the manager.’ And I said, ‘Very well, citizen, I’ll’ — ” A door opened, then instantly slammed shut, letting a burst of childish sobs escape. The telephone rang furiously. Romachkin