A Night by Vsevolod Garshin

The frosty air was all this time entering the window. A cloud of steam was literally pouring into the already cold room. The big squat lamp, with its opaque shade, standing on the writing-table, burned brightly, but only lighted the surface of the table, and a portion of the ceiling on which it formed a trembling round spot of light. The rest of the room was in semidarkness, through which could be discerned a bookcase, a large sofa, some other furniture, and a looking-glass on the wall, which reflected the lighted-up writing-table and the tall figure each time he strode past it in his restless movement from corner to corner of the room, eight paces there and eight paces back. Sometimes Alexei Petrovich stopped at the window. The cold current bathed his burning head, and his bared neck and chest. He shivered, but was not refreshed. He continued to recall those days in a series of fragmentary and disjointed reminiscences. He recalled numberless little trivial details, becoming confused in them, and unable to distinguish precisely what was important in them. He knew only one thing -- i.e., that up to twelve years of age, when his father sent him to school, he had lived an entirely different inner life, and he remembered that then it was better.

"What is drawing thee to that half-conscious life? What was there good in those childish years? A solitary child and a solitary grownup man -- a ‘crushed' man, as you yourself called him after his death. You were right, he was a ‘crushed' man. Life had quickly and easily destroyed all the good in him, all the good which he had collected in his youth, but at least it had not introduced anything bad. And he lived his time, helpless, with a helpless love which he devoted almost entirely to you."