ow is your land doing?"

"Oh, not very well. I make five per cent."

"Yes, but you don't reckon your own work. Aren't you worth
something too? I'll tell you my own case. Before I took to
seeing after the land, I had a salary of three hundred pounds
from the service. Now I do more work than I did in the service,
and like you I get five per cent. on the land, and thank God for
that. But one's work is thrown in for nothing."

"Then why do you do it, if it's a clear loss?"

"Oh, well, one does it! What would you have? It's habit, and
one knows it's how it should be. And what's more," the landowner
went on, leaning his elbows on the window and chatting on, "my
son, I must tell you, has no taste for it. There's no doubt
he'll be a scientific man. So there'll be no one to keep it up.
And yet one does it. Here this year I've planted an orchard."

"Yes, yes," said Levin, "that's perfectly true. I always feel
there's no real balance of gain in my work on the land, and yet
one does it.... It's a sort of duty one feels to the land."

"But I tell you what," the landowner pursued; "a neighbor of
mine, a merchant, was at my place. We walked about the fields
and the garden. 'No,' said he, 'Stepan Vassilievitch,
everything's well looked after, but your garden's neglected.'
But, as a fact, it's well kept up. 'To my thinking, I'd cut down
that lime-tree. Here you've thousands of limes, and each would
make two good bundles of bark. And nowadays that bark's worth
something. I'd cut down the lot.'"

"And with what he made he'd increase his stock, or buy some land
for a trifle, and let it out in lots to the peasants," Levin
added, smiling. He had evidently more than once come across
those commercial calculations. "And he'd make his fortune. But
you and I must thank God if we keep what we've got and leave it
to our children."

"You're married, I've heard?" said the landowner.

"Yes," Levin answered, with proud satisfaction. "Yes, it's
rather strange," he went on. "So we live without making
anything, as though we were ancient vestals set to keep in a
fire."

The landowner chuckled under his white mustaches.

"There are some among us, too, like our friend Nikolay
Ivanovitch, or Count Vronsky, that's settled here lately, who try
to carry on their husbandry as though it were a factory; but so
far it leads to nothing but making away with capital on it."

"But why is it we don't do like the merchants? Why d