She began thinking how she had to get a new flat in Moscow for the coming winter, to renew the drawing room furniture, and to make her elder girl a cloak. Then questions of the more remote future occurred to her: how she was to place her children in the world. “The girls are all right,” she thought; “but the boys?”

“It’s very well that I’m teaching Grisha, but of course that’s only because I am free myself now, I’m not with child. Stiva, of course, there’s no counting on. And with the help of good-natured friends I can bring them up; but if there’s another baby coming?...” And the thought struck her how untruly it was said that the curse laid on woman was that in sorrow she should bring forth children.

“The birth itself, that’s