ous, because I am a
painter, a queer fish, and have been worried all my life with envy,
discontent, disbelief in my work: I am always poor, I am a vagabond, but
you are a wealthy, normal man, a landowner, a gentleman--why do you live
so tamely and take so little from life? Why, for instance, haven't you
fallen in love with Lyda or Genya?"

"You forget that I love another woman," answered Bielokurov.

He meant his mistress, Lyabor Ivanovna, who lived with him in the
orchard house. I used to see the lady every day, very stout, podgy,
pompous, like a fatted goose, walking in the garden in a Russian
head-dress, always with a sunshade, and the servants used to call her to
meals or tea. Three years ago she rented a part of his house for the
summer, and stayed on to live with Bielokurov, apparently for ever. She
was ten years older than he and managed him very strictly, so that he
had to ask her permission to go out. She would often sob and make
horrible noises like a man with a cold, and then I used to send and tell
her that I'm if she did not stop I would go away. Then she would stop.

When we reached home, Bielokurov sat down on the divan and frowned and
brooded, and I began to pace up and down the hall, feeling a sweet
stirring in me, exactly like the stirring of love. I wanted to talk
about the Volchaninovs.

"Lyda could only fall in love with a Zemstvo worker like herself, some
one who is run off his legs with hospitals and schools," I said. "For
the sake of a girl like that a man might not only become a Zemstvo
worker, but might even become worn out, like the tale of the iron boots.
And Missyuss? How charming Missyuss is!"

Bielokurov began to talk at length and with his drawling er-er-ers of
the disease of the century--pessimism. He spoke confidently and
argumentatively. Hundreds of miles of deserted, monotonous, blackened
steppe could not so forcibly depress the mind as a man like that,
sitting and talking and showing no signs of going away.

"The point is neither pessimism nor optimism," I said irritably, "but
that ninety-nine out of a hundred have no sense."

Bielokurov took this to mean himself, was offended, and went away.

III

"The Prince is on a visit to Malozyomov and sends you his regards," said
Lyda to her mother, as she came in and took off her gloves. "He told me
many interesting things. He promised to bring forward in the Zemstvo
Council the question of a medical station at Malozyomov, but he