erhaps people are
perfectly right when they say that woman's shallowness rests on her
very vocation. Granted that it is her vocation to love her husband,
to bear children, and to mix salad, what the devil does she want
with learning? No, indeed!"

At that point he remembers that learned women are usually tedious,
that they are exacting, strict, and unyielding; and, on the other
hand, how easy it is to get on with silly Lidotchka, who never pokes
her nose into anything, does not understand so much, and never
obtrudes her criticism. There is peace and comfort with Lidotchka,
and no risk of being interfered with.

"Confound them, those clever and learned women! It's better and
easier to live with simple ones," he thinks, as he takes a plate
of chicken from Lidotchka.

He recollects that a civilised man sometimes feels a desire to talk
and share his thoughts with a clever and well-educated woman. "What
of it?" thinks Somov. "If I want to talk of intellectual subjects,
I'll go to Natalya Andreyevna . . . or to Marya Frantsovna. . . .
It's very simple! But no, I shan't go. One can discuss intellectual
subjects with men," he finally decides.

AT A SUMMER VILLA

"I LOVE YOU. You are my life, my happiness--everything to me! Forgive
the avowal, but I have not the strength to suffer and be silent. I
ask not for love in return, but for sympathy. Be at the old arbour
at eight o'clock this evening. . . . To sign my name is unnecessary
I think, but do not be uneasy at my being anonymous. I am young,
nice-looking . . . what more do you want?"

When Pavel Ivanitch Vyhodtsev, a practical married man who was
spending his holidays at a summer villa, read this letter, he
shrugged his shoulders and scratched his forehead in perplexity.

"What devilry is this?" he thought. "I'm a married man, and to send
me such a queer . . . silly letter! Who wrote it?"

Pavel Ivanitch turned the letter over and over before his eyes,
read it through again, and spat with disgust.

"'I love you'" . . . he said jeeringly. "A nice boy she has pitched
on! So I'm to run off to meet you in the arbour! . . . I got over
all such romances and _fleurs d'amour_ years ago, my girl. . . .
Hm! She must be some reckless, immoral creature. . . . Well, these
women are a set! What a whirligig--God forgive us!--she must be to
write a letter like that to a stranger, and a married man, too!
It's real demoralisation!"

In the course of his eight years of married li