live with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna for thirty years, perhaps,
and might leave your heirs a rich vineyard and three thousand acres
of maize; but I felt like a bankrupt from the first day. In the
town you have insufferable heat, boredom, and no society; if you
go out into the country, you fancy poisonous spiders, scorpions,
or snakes lurking under every stone and behind every bush, and
beyond the fields--mountains and the desert. Alien people, an
alien country, a wretched form of civilisation--all that is not
so easy, brother, as walking on the Nevsky Prospect in one's fur
coat, arm-in-arm with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, dreaming of the sunny
South. What is needed here is a life and death struggle, and I'm
not a fighting man. A wretched neurasthenic, an idle gentleman
. . . . From the first day I knew that my dreams of a life of labour
and of a vineyard were worthless. As for love, I ought to tell you
that living with a woman who has read Spencer and has followed you
to the ends of the earth is no more interesting than living with
any Anfissa or Akulina. There's the same smell of ironing, of powder,
and of medicines, the same curl-papers every morning, the same
self-deception."

"You can't get on in the house without an iron," said Samoylenko,
blushing at Laevsky's speaking to him so openly of a lady he knew.
"You are out of humour to-day, Vanya, I notice. Nadyezhda Fyodorovna
is a splendid woman, highly educated, and you are a man of the
highest intellect. Of course, you are not married," Samoylenko went
on, glancing round at the adjacent tables, "but that's not your
fault; and besides . . . one ought to be above conventional prejudices
and rise to the level of modern ideas. I believe in free love myself,
yes. . . . But to my thinking, once you have settled together, you
ought to go on living together all your life."

"Without love?"

"I will tell you directly," said Samoylenko. "Eight years ago there
was an old fellow, an agent, here--a man of very great intelligence.
Well, he used to say that the great thing in married life was
patience. Do you hear, Vanya? Not love, but patience. Love cannot
last long. You have lived two years in love, and now evidently your
married life has reached the period when, in order to preserve
equilibrium, so to speak, you ought to exercise all your
patience. . . ."

"You believe in your old agent; to me his words are meaningless.
Your old man could be a hypocrite; he could exercise himself in