Then at twenty-one-thirty o’clock.⁠ ⁠… In the room to the left the curtains were lowered, and in the room to the right my neighbor was sitting over a book. His head is bald and covered with bulging lumps. His forehead is enormous⁠—a yellow parabola. I was walking up and down the room⁠—suffering. How could I meet her, after all that happened! O-90 , I mean. I felt plainly to my right, how the eyes of my neighbor were staring at me. I clearly saw the wrinkles on his forehead like a row of yellow, illegible lines; and for some reason I was certain that those lines dealt with me.

A quarter of an hour before twenty-two, the cheerful, rosy whirlwind was in my room; the firm ring of her rosy arms closed about my neck. Then I felt how that ring grew weaker and weaker, and then it broke and her arms dropped.⁠ ⁠…

“You are not the same, not the same man! You are no longer mine!”