Nadejda Nicolaievna by Vsevolod Garshin

For a whole fortnight I did nothing. I went to the Academy merely to paint the programme picture, a terrible Biblical study -- the turning of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt. Everything was ready -- Lot and his family -- but the pillar! I could not imagine it -- whether to paint it as a sort of tombstone or a simple statue of Lot's wife made of rock-salt.

Life dragged along wearily. I received two letters from Sonia. I read her pretty prattle about life in the Institute -- how she read secretly, evading the Argus-eyed class mistress -- and I added her letters to the others, bound up by a pink ribbon. I had kept this ribbon for fifteen years, and up to the present had not been able to make up my mind to throw it away. Why throw it away? With whom did it interfere? But what would Bezsonow have said had he seen this evidence of my sentimentality? Would he again have gone into raptures over my "cleanness," or commenced to jeer?