d say something rude to Yulia at their first meeting.
And something strange had happened of late to his brother Fyodor.
In his long letters he had taken to writing of the importance of
health, of the effect of illness on the mental condition, of the
meaning of religion, but not a word about Moscow or business. These
letters irritated Laptev, and he thought his brother's character
was changing for the worse.

The wedding was in September. The ceremony took place at the Church
of St. Peter and St. Paul, after mass, and the same day the young
couple set off for Moscow. When Laptev and his wife, in a black
dress with a long train, already looking not a girl but a married
woman, said good-bye to Nina Fyodorovna, the invalid's face worked,
but there was no tear in her dry eyes. She said:

"If--which God forbid--I should die, take care of my little
girls."

"Oh, I promise!" answered Yulia Sergeyevna, and her lips and eyelids
began quivering too.

"I shall come to see you in October," said Laptev, much moved. "You
must get better, my darling."

They travelled in a special compartment. Both felt depressed and
uncomfortable. She sat in the corner without taking off her hat,
and made a show of dozing, and he lay on the seat opposite, and he
was disturbed by various thoughts--of his father, of "a certain
person," whether Yulia would like her Moscow flat. And looking at
his wife, who did not love him, he wondered dejectedly "why this
had happened."

V

The Laptevs had a wholesale business in Moscow, dealing in fancy
goods: fringe, tape, trimmings, crochet cotton, buttons, and so on.
The gross receipts reached two millions a year; what the net profit
was, no one knew but the old father. The sons and the clerks estimated
the profits at approximately three hundred thousand, and said that
it would have been a hundred thousand more if the old man had not
"been too free-handed"--that is, had not allowed credit
indiscriminately. In the last ten years alone the bad debts had
mounted up to the sum of a million; and when the subject was referred
to, the senior clerk would wink slyly and deliver himself of sentences
the meaning of which was not clear to every one:

"The psychological sequences of the age."

Their chief commercial operations were conducted in the town market
in a building which was called the warehouse. The entrance to the
warehouse was in the yard, where it was always dark, and smelt of
matting and where the dray