y and we must wait a bit with our
deep social movements; we are not mature enough for them yet; and
to tell the truth, we don't know anything about them."

"You don't know anything about them, but I do," said Mariya Viktorovna.
"Goodness, how tiresome you are to-day!"

"Our duty is to study and to study, to try to accumulate as much
knowledge as possible, for genuine social movements arise where
there is knowledge; and the happiness of mankind in the future lies
only in knowledge. I drink to science!"

"There is no doubt about one thing: one must organize one's life
somehow differently," said Mariya Viktorovna, after a moment's
silence and thought. "Life, such as it has been hitherto, is not
worth having. Don't let us talk about it."

As we came away from her the cathedral clock struck two.

"Did you like her?" asked the doctor; "she's nice, isn't she?"

On Christmas day we dined with Mariya Viktorovna, and all through
the holidays we went to see her almost every day. There was never
anyone there but ourselves, and she was right when she said that
she had no friends in the town but the doctor and me. We spent our
time for the most part in conversation; sometimes the doctor brought
some book or magazine and read aloud to us. In reality he was the
first well-educated man I had met in my life: I cannot judge whether
he knew a great deal, but he always displayed his knowledge as
though he wanted other people to share it. When he talked about
anything relating to medicine he was not like any one of the doctors
in our town, but made a fresh, peculiar impression upon me, and I
fancied that if he liked he might have become a real man of science.
And he was perhaps the only person who had a real influence upon
me at that time. Seeing him, and reading the books he gave me, I
began little by little to feel a thirst for the knowledge which
would have given significance to my cheerless labour. It seemed
strange to me, for instance, that I had not known till then that
the whole world was made up of sixty elements, I had not known what
oil was, what paints were, and that I could have got on without
knowing these things. My acquaintance with the doctor elevated me
morally too. I was continually arguing with him and, though I usually
remained of my own opinion, yet, thanks to him, I began to perceive
that everything was not clear to me, and I began trying to work out
as far as I could definite convictions in myself, that the dict