does," said Byelokurov, with a sigh.
"Yes, a splendid, intellectual family! I've dropped out of all
decent society; it's dreadful how I've dropped out of it! It's all
through work, work, work!"

He talked of how hard one had to work if one wanted to be a model
farmer. And I thought what a heavy, sluggish fellow he was! Whenever
he talked of anything serious he articulated "Er-er with intense
effort, and worked just as he talked--slowly, always late and
behind-hand. I had little faith in his business capacity if only
from the fact that when I gave him letters to post he carried them
about in his pocket for weeks together.

"The hardest thing of all," he muttered as he walked beside me--
"the hardest thing of all is that, work as one may, one meets with
no sympathy from any one. No sympathy!"

II

I took to going to see the Voltchaninovs. As a rule I sat on the
lower step of the terrace; I was fretted by dissatisfaction with
myself; I was sorry at the thought of my life passing so rapidly
and uninterestingly, and felt as though I would like to tear out
of my breast the heart which had grown so heavy. And meanwhile I
heard talk on the terrace, the rustling of dresses, the pages of a
book being turned. I soon grew accustomed to the idea that during
the day Lida received patients, gave out books, and often went into
the village with a parasol and no hat, and in the evening talked
aloud of the Zemstvo and schools. This slim, handsome, invariably
austere girl, with her small well-cut mouth, always said dryly when
the conversation turned on serious subjects:

"That's of no interest to you."

She did not like me. She disliked me because I was a landscape
painter and did not in my pictures portray the privations of the
peasants, and that, as she fancied, I was indifferent to what she
put such faith in. I remember when I was travelling on the banks
of Lake Baikal, I met a Buriat girl on horseback, wearing a shirt
and trousers of blue Chinese canvas; I asked her if she would sell
me her pipe. While we talked she looked contemptuously at my European
face and hat, and in a moment she was bored with talking to me; she
shouted to her horse and galloped on. And in just the same way Lida
despised me as an alien. She never outwardly expressed her dislike
for me, but I felt it, and sitting on the lower step of the terrace,
I felt irritated, and said that doctoring peasants when one was not
a doctor was deceiving them, and that it