The Lady with the Dog

People at Yalta were saying that a new face had appeared on the sea-front: a lady with a little dog.Dmitri Gurov, who had already spent two weeks in the town and was thoroughly bored, had begun to take an interest in everyone who was new.From a table outside a café he watched the fair-haired young woman walk past along the water, a white Pomeranian trotting after her.

Gurov was not yet forty, but he already had a daughter of twelve and two sons at school.He had married young, and by now his wife seemed almost twice his age: a tall, serious woman who read a great deal and thought of herself as clever.He privately thought her narrow and dull, was a little afraid of her, and did not like to be at home.

He had been unfaithful to her for years, and often, and he had picked up the habit of speaking of women unkindly, calling them "the lower race."And yet he could not get through two days without them; among men he was bored and stiff, but with women he felt free and knew exactly what to say.Something in his looks and his manner attracted women, and he knew it.

One evening, while he was dining in the public gardens, the woman in the béret came over and sat down at the next table.Her expression, her walk, and her dress all told him that she was married, that she was travelling alone, and that she was not enjoying herself.He beckoned to the little dog, and when it came near he wagged his finger at it; the dog growled, and the woman said quickly, "He doesn't bite," and blushed.

He asked whether he might give the dog a bone, and with that the two of them began to talk.She told him that she had grown up in Petersburg but had married and moved to the town of S—, where she had lived for two years, and that her name was Anna Sergeyevna.She spoke of her husband vaguely, half-laughing that she could not even say for certain where it was that he worked.

Later, alone in his room, he thought about her — how young she still seemed, how shy, how new to all of this — and he felt certain he would meet her again the next day."There is something pathetic about her, all the same," he thought, and fell asleep.