Too Much Happiness

with him at once. They rode home, all three without a word, and at the dinner table he said, “Allow me to introduce to you my future son-in-law, Vladimir Kovalevsky.”
    So it was done. Sophia was overjoyed, not indeed to be marrying Vladimir but to be pleasing Aniuta by striking a blow for the emancipation of Russian women. There was a conventional and splendid wedding in Palibino, and the bride and groom went off to live under one roof in Petersburg.
    And once their way was clear they went abroad and did not continue to live under one roof anymore. Heidelberg, then Berlin for Sophia, Munich for Vladimir. He visited Heidelberg when he could, but after Aniuta and her friend Zhanna arrived there, and Julia-all four women theoretically under his protection-there was not enough room for him any longer.
    Weierstrass did not reveal to the women that he had been in correspondence with the General’s wife. He had written to her when Sophia returned from Switzerland (really from Paris) looking so worn and frail that he was concerned for her health. The mother had replied, informing him that it was Paris, in these most dangerous times, that was responsible for her daughter’s state. But she seemed less upset by the political upheaval her daughters had lived through than by the revelations that one of them, while unmarried, lived openly with a man, and the other, properly wed, did not truly live with her husband at all. So he was made rather against his will to be the mother’s confidant even before he was the daughter’s. And indeed he told Sophia nothing about this until her mother was dead.
    But when he did tell her at last, he told her also that Clara and Elisa had asked immediately what was to be done.
    This seemed to be the way of women, he had said, to assume that something should be done.
    He had replied, quite severely, “Nothing.”
    In the morning Sophia took a clean though crumpled frock out of her bag-she had never learned how to pack tidily-fixed her curly hair as well as she could to hide some little patches of gray, and came downstairs to the sounds of a household already astir. Her place was the only one still set in the dining room. Elisa brought in the coffee and the first German breakfast that Sophia had ever eaten in this house-cold sliced meat and cheese and thickly buttered bread. She said that Clara was upstairs preparing their brother for his meeting with Sophia.
    “At first we had the barber come in,” she said. “But then Clara learned to do it quite well. She turned out to be the one who has the skills of a nurse, it is fortunate one of us has them.”
    Even before she said this Sophia had sensed that they were short of money. The damask and net curtains had a dingy look, the silver knife and fork she used had not recently been polished. Through the open door to the sitting room a rough-looking young girl, their present servant, was visible cleaning out the grate and raising clouds of dust. Elisa looked her way, as if to ask her to shut the door, then got up and did it herself. She came back to the table with a flushed, downcast face, and Sophia asked hastily, if rather impolitely, what was the illness of Herr Weierstrass?
    “It is a weakness of his heart for one thing, and the pneumonia he had in the autumn that he cannot seem to get over. Also he has a growth in the generative organs,” said Elisa, lowering her voice but speaking frankly as German women did.
    Clara appeared in the doorway.
    “He is waiting for you now.”
    Sophia climbed the stairs thinking not of the professor but of these two women who had made him the center of their lives. Knitting mufflers, mending the linen, making the puddings and preserves that could never be trusted to a servant. Honoring the Roman Catholic Church as their brother did-a cold undiverting religion in Sophia’s opinion-and all without a moment of mutiny as far as you could see, or any flicker of dissatisfaction.
    I would go mad, she thought.
    Even to be a professor, she thought, I would go mad. Students have mediocre minds, generally speaking. Only the most obvious, regular patterns can be impressed on them.
    She would not have dared admit this to herself before she had Maksim.
    She entered the bedroom smiling at her luck, her coming freedom, her soon-to-be husband.
    “Ah, here you are at last,” said Weierstrass, speaking somewhat weakly and laboriously. “The naughty child, we thought she had deserted us. Are you on your way to Paris