f it is," he murmured as he walked along by my side, "the
worst of it is that you go working away and never get any sympathy from
anybody."

II

I began to frequent the Volchaninovs' house. Usually I sat on the bottom
step of the veranda. I was filled with dissatisfaction, vague discontent
with my life, which had passed so quickly and uninterestingly, and I
thought all the while how good it would be to tear out of my breast my
heart which had grown so weary. There would be talk going on on the
terrace, the rustling of dresses, the fluttering of the pages of a
book. I soon got used to Lyda receiving the sick all day long, and
distributing books, and I used often to go with her to the village,
bareheaded, under an umbrella. And in the evening she would hold forth
about the Zemstvo and schools. She was very handsome, subtle, correct,
and her lips were thin and sensitive, and whenever a serious
conversation started she would say to me drily:

"This won't interest you."

I was not sympathetic to her. She did not like me because I was a
landscape-painter, and in my pictures did not paint the suffering of the
masses, and I seemed to her indifferent to what she believed in. I
remember once driving along the shore of the Baikal and I met a Bouryat
girl, in shirt and trousers of Chinese cotton, on horseback: I asked her
if she would sell me her pipe and, while we were talking, she looked
with scorn at my European face and hat, and in a moment she got bored
with talking to me, whooped and galloped away. And in exactly the same
way Lyda despised me as a stranger. Outwardly she never showed her
dislike of me, but I felt it, and, as I sat on the bottom step of the
terrace, I had a certain irritation and said that treating the peasants
without being a doctor meant deceiving them, and that it is easy to be
a benefactor when one owns four thousand acres.

Her sister, Missyuss, had no such cares and spent her time in complete
idleness, like myself. As soon as she got up in the morning she would
take a book and read it on the terrace, sitting far back in a lounge
chair so that her feet hardly touched the ground, or she would hide
herself with her book in the lime-walk, or she would go through the gate
into the field. She would read all day long, eagerly poring over the
book, and only through her looking fatigued, dizzy, and pale sometimes,
was it possible to guess how much her reading exhausted her. When she
saw me come she would