alled "dog's ears." The hair was combed back over the
ears, and it made Maria Victorovna's face look broader, and she looked
very like her father, whose face was broad and red and rather like a
coachman's. She was handsome and elegant, but not young; about thirty to
judge by her appearance, though she was not more than twenty-five.

"Dear doctor!" she said, making me sit down. "How grateful I am to him.
But for him, you would not have come. I am bored to death! My father has
gone and left me alone, and I do not know what to do with myself."

Then she began to ask where I was working, how much I got, and where I
lived.

"Do you only spend what you earn on yourself?" she asked.

"Yes."

"You are a happy man," she replied. "All the evil in life, it seems to
me, comes from boredom and idleness, and spiritual emptiness, which are
inevitable when one lives at other people's expense. Don't think I'm
showing off. I mean it sincerely. It is dull and unpleasant to be rich.
Win friends by just riches, they say, because as a rule there is and can
be no such thing as just riches."

She looked at the furniture with a serious, cold expression, as though
she was making an inventory of it, and went on:

"Ease and comfort possess a magic power. Little by little they seduce
even strong-willed people. Father and I used to live poorly and simply,
and now you see how we live. Isn't it strange?" she said with a shrug.
"We spend twenty thousand roubles a year! In the provinces!"

"Ease and comfort must not be regarded as the inevitable privilege of
capital and education," I said. "It seems to me possible to unite the
comforts of life with work, however hard and dirty it may be. Your
father is rich, but, as he says, he used to be a mechanic, and just a
lubricator."

She smiled and shook her head thoughtfully.

"Papa sometimes eats _tiurya_," she said, "but only out of caprice."

A bell rang and she got up.

"The rich and the educated ought to work like the rest," she went on,
"and if there is to be any comfort, it should be accessible to all.
There should be no privileges. However, that's enough philosophy. Tell
me something cheerful. Tell me about the painters. What are they like?
Funny?"

The doctor came. I began to talk about the painters, but, being unused
to it, I felt awkward and talked solemnly and ponderously like an
ethnographist. The doctor also told a few stories about working people.
He rocked to and fro and cried, a