Too Much Happiness

not always be happy calling out the stations.”
    “Why not? It’s very useful. It’s always necessary. Being a mathematician isn’t necessary, as I see it.”
    She kept silent.
    “I could not respect myself,” he said. “Being a professor of mathematics.”
    They were climbing to the station platform.
    “Just getting prizes and a lot of money for things nobody understands or cares about and that are no use to anybody.”
    “Thank you for carrying my bag.”
    She handed him some money, though not so much as she had intended. He took it with an unpleasant grin, as if to say, You thought I’d be too proud, didn’t you? Then he thanked her, hurriedly, as if this was against his will.
    She watched him go and thought it was quite likely she would never see him again. Aniuta’s child. And how like Aniuta he was, after all. Aniuta disrupting almost every family meal at Palibino with her lofty tirades. Aniuta pacing the garden paths, full of scorn for her present life and faith in her destiny which would take her into some entirely new and just and ruthless world.
    Urey might change his course; there was no telling. He might even come to have some fondness for his aunt Sophia, though probably not till he was as old as she was now, and she long dead.

III
    Sophia was half an hour early for her train. She wanted some tea, and lozenges for her throat, but she could not face the waiting in line or the speaking French. No matter how well you can manage when you are in good health, it does not take much of a droop of spirits or a premonition of sickness to send you back to the shelter of your nursery language. She sat on a bench and let her head drop. She could sleep for a moment.
    More than a moment. Fifteen minutes had passed by the station clock. There was a crowd gathered now, a great deal of bustle around her, baggage carts on the move.
    As she hurried towards her train she saw a man wearing a fur hat like Maksim’s. A big man, in a dark overcoat. She could not see his face. He was moving away from her. But his wide shoulders, his courteous but determined manner of making way for himself, strongly reminded her of Maksim.
    A cart piled high with freight passed between them, and the man was gone.
    Of course it could not be Maksim. What could he be doing in Paris? What train or appointment could he be hurrying towards? Her heart had begun to beat unpleasantly as she climbed aboard her train and found her seat by a window. It stood to reason that there should have been other women in Maksim’s life. There had been, for instance, the woman he could not introduce Sophia to, when he refused to invite her to Beaulieu. But she believed that he was not a man for tawdry complications. Much less for jealous fits, for female tears and scoldings. He had pointed out on that earlier occasion that she had no rights, no hold on him.
    Which surely meant that he would consider she had some hold now, and would have felt it beneath his dignity to deceive her.
    And when she thought she saw him she had just wakened out of an unnatural unhealthy sleep. She had been hallucinating.
    The train got itself together with the usual groans and clatter and slowly passed beyond the station roof.
    How she used to love Paris. Not the Paris of the Commune where she had been under Aniuta’s excited and sometimes incomprehensible orders, but the Paris she had visited later, in the fullness of her adult life, with introductions to mathematicians and political thinkers. In Paris, she had proclaimed, there is no such thing as boredom or snobbishness or deception.
    Then they had given her the Bordin Prize, they had kissed her hand and presented her with speeches and flowers in the most elegant lavishly lit rooms. But they had closed their doors when it came to giving her a job. They would no more think of that than of employing a learned chimpanzee. The wives of the great scientists preferred not to meet her, or invite her into their homes.
    Wives were the watchers on the barricade, the invisible implacable army. Husbands shrugged sadly at their prohibitions but gave them their due. Men whose brains were blowing old notions apart were still in thrall to women whose heads were full of nothing but the necessity of tight corsets, calling cards, and conversations that filled your throat with a kind of perfumed fog.
    She must stop this litany of resentment. The wives of Stockholm invited her into their houses, to the most important parties and intimate