scarcely perceptible smile I had then caught. ‘Yes, it is all over,’ said one voice, and immediately the other voice said something entirely different. ‘Something has come over you, it can’t be that it is so,’ said the other voice. It felt uncanny lying in the dark and I struck a light, and felt a kind of terror in that little room with its yellow wallpaper. I lit a cigarette and, as always happens when one’s thought go round and round in a circle of insoluble contradictions, I smoked, taking one cigarette after another in order to befog myself so as not to see those contradictions.
“I did not sleep all night, and at five in the morning, having decided that I could not continue in such a state of tension, I rose, woke the caretaker who attended me and sent him to get horses. I sent a note to the Council saying that I had been recalled to Moscow on urgent business and asking that one of the members should take my place. At eight o’clock I got into my trap and started.”