al faculty for getting through twenty roubles in an evening
at such a poor cheap tavern as the _Volga_.

My sister began coming to see me again; they both expressed surprise
every time on seeing each other, but from her joyful, guilty face
it was evident that these meetings were not accidental. One evening,
when we were playing billiards, the doctor said to me:

"I say, why don't you go and see Miss Dolzhikov? You don't know
Mariya Viktorovna; she is a clever creature, a charmer, a simple,
good-natured soul."

I described how her father had received me in the spring.

"Nonsense!" laughed the doctor, "the engineer's one thing and she's
another. Really, my dear fellow, you mustn't be nasty to her; go
and see her sometimes. For instance, let's go and see her tomorrow
evening. What do you say?"

He persuaded me. The next evening I put on my new serge trousers,
and in some agitation I set off to Miss Dolzhikov's. The footman
did not seem so haughty and terrible, nor the furniture so gorgeous,
as on that morning when I had come to ask a favour. Mariya Viktorovna
was expecting me, and she received me like an old acquaintance,
shaking hands with me in a friendly way. She was wearing a grey
cloth dress with full sleeves, and had her hair done in the style
which we used to call "dogs' ears," when it came into fashion in
the town a year before. The hair was combed down over the ears, and
this made Mariya Viktorovna's face look broader, and she seemed to
me this time very much like her father, whose face was broad and
red, with something in its expression like a sledge-driver. She was
handsome and elegant, but not youthful looking; she looked thirty,
though in reality she was not more than twenty-five.

"Dear Doctor, how grateful I am to you," she said, making me sit
down. "If it hadn't been for him you wouldn't have come to see me.
I am bored to death! My father has gone away and left me alone, and
I don't know what to do with myself in this town."

Then she began asking me where I was working now, how much I earned,
where I lived.

"Do you spend on yourself nothing but what you earn?" she asked.

"No."

"Happy man!" she sighed. "All the evil in life, it seems to me,
comes from idleness, boredom, and spiritual emptiness, and all this
is inevitable when one is accustomed to living at other people's
expense. Don't think I am showing off, I tell you truthfully: it
is not interesting or pleasant to be rich. 'Make to yours