Everything about Lyudmila he now found repulsive: her yellow locks, fashionably bobbed, the streaks of unshaven black hairs down the nape of her neck, her dark, languid eyelids, and above all her lips, glossy with purple-red lipstick. He was bored and repelled when as she dressed, after a bout of mechanical lovemaking, she would narrow her eyes, which at once gave them an unpleasantly shaggy look, and say, ‘I’m so sensitive, you know, that I shall be able to tell at once when you don’t love me as much as you used to.’ Ganin, without replying, turned away toward the window, where there rose a white wall of smoke. Then she would give a little nasal snigger and call him in a husky whisper: ‘Come here.’ At that moment he felt like wringing his hands to make the joints crack in delicious pain, and say to her, ‘Get out, woman, and goodbye.’ Instead of that he smiled and bent down to her. She would run her nails, so sharp that they might have been artificial, over his chest, and pit, and flutter her coal-black eyelashes in her performance of a slighted girl or a capricious marquise. There seemed to him something sleazy, stale and old in the smell of her perfume, although she herself was only twenty-five. As he brushed her hot little forehead with his lips she forgot everything – forgot the falsity which she trailed around everywhere like her scent, the falsity of her baby talk, of her exquisite senses, of her passion for some imaginary orchids, as well as for Poe and Baudelaire, whom she had never read; she forgot all her factious charms, her modishly yellow hair, sultry face powder and piggy-pink silk stockings – and tilting back her head, she would press against Ganin her whole feeble, pathetic, unwanted flesh.