not draw well, but both the portraits were like us. She
laughed, and was full of mischief and charming grimaces, and this
suited her better than talking about the mammon of unrighteousness,
and it seemed to me that she had been talking just before about
wealth and luxury, not in earnest, but in imitation of someone. She
was a superb comic actress. I mentally compared her with our young
ladies, and even the handsome, dignified Anyuta Blagovo could not
stand comparison with her; the difference was immense, like the
difference between a beautiful, cultivated rose and a wild briar.

We had supper together, the three of us. The doctor and Mariya
Viktorovna drank red wine, champagne, and coffee with brandy in it;
they clinked glasses and drank to friendship, to enlightenment, to
progress, to liberty, and they did not get drunk but only flushed,
and were continually, for no reason, laughing till they cried. So
as not to be tiresome I drank claret too.

"Talented, richly endowed natures," said Miss Dolzhikov, "know how
to live, and go their own way; mediocre people, like myself for
instance, know nothing and can do nothing of themselves; there is
nothing left for them but to discern some deep social movement, and
to float where they are carried by it."

"How can one discern what doesn't exist?" asked the doctor.

"We think so because we don't see it."

"Is that so? The social movements are the invention of the new
literature. There are none among us."

An argument began.

"There are no deep social movements among us and never have been,"
the doctor declared loudly. "There is no end to what the new
literature has invented! It has invented intellectual workers in
the country, and you may search through all our villages and find
at the most some lout in a reefer jacket or a black frock-coat who
will make four mistakes in spelling a word of three letters. Cultured
life has not yet begun among us. There's the same savagery, the
same uniform boorishness, the same triviality, as five hundred years
ago. Movements, currents there have been, but it has all been petty,
paltry, bent upon vulgar and mercenary interests--and one cannot
see anything important in them. If you think you have discerned a
deep social movement, and in following it you devote yourself to
tasks in the modern taste, such as the emancipation of insects from
slavery or abstinence from beef rissoles, I congratulate you, Madam.
We must study, and study, and stud