etceteras.
Do you know, Vera Gavrilovna, here I have lived twenty-nine years
in the world and never had a romance. No romantic episode in my
whole life, so that I only know by hearsay of rendezvous, 'avenues
of sighs,' and kisses. It's not normal! In town, when one sits in
one's lodgings, one does not notice the blank, but here in the fresh
air one feels it. . . . One resents it!"

"Why is it?"

"I don't know. I suppose I've never had time, or perhaps it was I
have never met women who. . . . In fact, I have very few acquaintances
and never go anywhere."

For some three hundred paces the young people walked on in silence.
Ognev kept glancing at Verotchka's bare head and shawl, and days
of spring and summer rose to his mind one after another. It had
been a period when far from his grey Petersburg lodgings, enjoying
the friendly warmth of kind people, nature, and the work he loved,
he had not had time to notice how the sunsets followed the glow of
dawn, and how, one after another foretelling the end of summer,
first the nightingale ceased singing, then the quail, then a little
later the landrail. The days slipped by unnoticed, so that life
must have been happy and easy. He began calling aloud how reluctantly
he, poor and unaccustomed to change of scene and society, had come
at the end of April to the N---- District, where he had expected
dreariness, loneliness, and indifference to statistics, which he
considered was now the foremost among the sciences. When he arrived
on an April morning at the little town of N---- he had put up at
the inn kept by Ryabuhin, the Old Believer, where for twenty kopecks
a day they had given him a light, clean room on condition that he
should not smoke indoors. After resting and finding who was the
president of the District Zemstvo, he had set off at once on foot
to Kuznetsov. He had to walk three miles through lush meadows and
young copses. Larks were hovering in the clouds, filling the air
with silvery notes, and rooks flapping their wings with sedate
dignity floated over the green cornland.

"Good heavens!" Ognev had thought in wonder; "can it be that there's
always air like this to breathe here, or is this scent only to-day,
in honour of my coming?"

Expecting a cold business-like reception, he went in to Kuznetsov's
diffidently, looking up from under his eyebrows and shyly pulling
his beard. At first Kuznetsov wrinkled up his brows and could not
understand what use the Zemstvo coul