on are
staying here all the while, and I come down two or three times a
week. I haven't time to come every day; besides, it is expensive."

"You're right there; it is expensive," sighed he of the ginger
trousers. "In town you can't walk to the station, you have to take
a cab; and then, the ticket costs forty-two kopecks; you buy a paper
for the journey; one is tempted to drink a glass of vodka. It's all
petty expenditure not worth considering, but, mind you, in the
course of the summer it will run up to some two hundred roubles.
Of course, to be in the lap of Nature is worth any money--I don't
dispute it . . . idyllic and all the rest of it; but of course,
with the salary an official gets, as you know yourself, every
farthing has to be considered. If you waste a halfpenny you lie
awake all night. . . . Yes. . . I receive, my dear sir--I haven't
the honour of knowing your name--I receive a salary of very nearly
two thousand roubles a year. I am a civil councillor, I smoke
second-rate tobacco, and I haven't a rouble to spare to buy Vichy
water, prescribed me by the doctor for gall-stones."

"It's altogether abominable," said Zaikin after a brief silence.
"I maintain, sir, that summer holidays are the invention of the
devil and of woman. The devil was actuated in the present instance
by malice, woman by excessive frivolity. Mercy on us, it is not
life at all; it is hard labour, it is hell! It's hot and stifling,
you can hardly breathe, and you wander about like a lost soul and
can find no refuge. In town there is no furniture, no servants. . .
everything has been carried off to the villa: you eat what you
can get; you go without your tea because there is no one to heat
the samovar; you can't wash yourself; and when you come down here
into this 'lap of Nature' you have to walk, if you please, through
the dust and heat. . . . Phew! Are you married?"

"Yes. . . three children," sighs Ginger Trousers.

"It's abominable altogether. . . . It's a wonder we are still alive."

At last the summer visitors reached their destination. Zaikin said
good-bye to Ginger Trousers and went into his villa. He found a
death-like silence in the house. He could hear nothing but the
buzzing of the gnats, and the prayer for help of a fly destined for
the dinner of a spider. The windows were hung with muslin curtains,
through which the faded flowers of the geraniums showed red. On the
unpainted wooden walls near the oleographs flies were slumb