"The peasants are furious. They might do something to you. No. Wait.
I'll go with you."

We used to drive over to Kurilovka together and then the carpenters
would ask for tips. The framework was ready for the foundations to be
laid, but the masons never came and when at last the masons did come it
was apparent that there was no sand; somehow it had been forgotten that
sand was wanted. Taking advantage of our helplessness, the peasants
asked thirty copecks a load, although it was less than a quarter of a
mile from the building to the river where the sand was to be fetched,
and more than five hundred loads were needed. There were endless
misunderstandings, wrangles, and continual begging. My wife was
indignant and the building contractor, Petrov, an old man of seventy,
took her by the hand and said:

"You look here! Look here! Just get me sand and I'll find ten men and
have the work done in two days. Look here!"

Sand was brought, but two, four days, a week passed and still there
yawned a ditch where the foundations were to be.

"I shall go mad," cried my wife furiously. "What wretches they are! What
wretches!"

During these disturbances Victor Ivanich used to come and see us. He
used to bring hampers of wine and dainties, and eat for a long time, and
then go to sleep on the terrace and snore so that the labourers shook
their heads and said:

"He's all right!"

Masha took no pleasure in his visits. She did not believe in him, and
yet she used to ask his advice; when, after a sound sleep after dinner,
he got up out of humour, and spoke disparagingly of our domestic
arrangements, and said he was sorry he had ever bought Dubechnia which
had cost him so much, and poor Masha looked miserably anxious and
complained to him, he would yawn and say the peasants ought to be
flogged.

He called our marriage and the life we were living a comedy, and used to
say it was a caprice, a whimsy.

"She did the same sort of thing once before," he told me. "She fancied
herself as an opera singer, and ran away from me. It took me two months
to find her, and my dear fellow, I wasted a thousand roubles on
telegrams alone."

He had dropped calling me a sectarian or the House-painter; and no
longer approved of my life as a working man, but he used to say:

"You are a queer fish! An abnormality. I don't venture to prophesy, but
you will end badly!"

Masha slept poorly at nights and would sit by the window of our bedroom
thinking. She