e alone and not to have to talk to any one.

At home he found Varya and his father-in-law, who had come to dinner.
Varya's eyes were red with crying, and she complained of a headache,
while Shelestov ate a great deal, saying that young men nowadays
were unreliable, and that there was very little gentlemanly feeling
among them.

"It's loutishness!" he said. "I shall tell him so to his face: 'It's
loutishness, sir,' I shall say."

Nikitin smiled affably and helped Masha to look after their guests,
but after dinner he went to his study and shut the door.

The March sun was shining brightly in at the windows and shedding
its warm rays on the table. It was only the twentieth of the month,
but already the cabmen were driving with wheels, and the starlings
were noisy in the garden. It was just the weather in which Masha
would come in, put one arm round his neck, tell him the horses were
saddled or the chaise was at the door, and ask him what she should
put on to keep warm. Spring was beginning as exquisitely as last
spring, and it promised the same joys. . . . But Nikitin was thinking
that it would be nice to take a holiday and go to Moscow, and stay
at his old lodgings there. In the next room they were drinking
coffee and talking of Captain Polyansky, while he tried not to
listen and wrote in his diary: "Where am I, my God? I am surrounded
by vulgarity and vulgarity. Wearisome, insignificant people, pots
of sour cream, jugs of milk, cockroaches, stupid women. . . . There
is nothing more terrible, mortifying, and distressing than vulgarity.
I must escape from here, I must escape today, or I shall go out of
my mind!"

NOT WANTED

BETWEEN six and seven o'clock on a July evening, a crowd of summer
visitors--mostly fathers of families--burdened with parcels,
portfolios, and ladies' hat-boxes, was trailing along from the
little station of Helkovo, in the direction of the summer villas.
They all looked exhausted, hungry, and ill-humoured, as though the
sun were not shining and the grass were not green for them.

Trudging along among the others was Pavel Matveyitch Zaikin, a
member of the Circuit Court, a tall, stooping man, in a cheap cotton
dust-coat and with a cockade on his faded cap. He was perspiring,
red in the face, and gloomy. . . .

"Do you come out to your holiday home every day?" said a summer
visitor, in ginger-coloured trousers, addressing him.

"No, not every day," Zaikin answered sullenly. "My wife and s