e is no one with whom he cares to associate. Naturally he is not a
sociable man, and he has acquired a stiff, formal, reserved manner
that is rarely met with in Russia. This manner repels the neighbouring
proprietors--a fact that he does not at all regret, for they do not
belong to his monde, and they have in their manners and habits a
free-and-easy rusticity which is positively disagreeable to him. His
relations with them are therefore confined to formal calls. The greater
part of the day he spends in listless loitering, frequently yawning,
regretting the routine of St. Petersburg life--the pleasant chats with
his colleagues, the opera, the ballet, the French theatre, and the quiet
rubber at the Club Anglais. His spirits rise as the day of his departure
approaches, and when he drives off to the station he looks bright and
cheerful. If he consulted merely his own tastes he would never visit his
estates at all, and would spend his summer holidays in Germany, France,
or Switzerland, as he did in his bachelor days; but as a large landowner
he considers it right to sacrifice his personal inclinations to the
duties of his position.

There is, by the way, another princely magnate in the district, and
I ought perhaps to introduce him to my readers, because he represents
worthily a new type. Like Prince S----, of whom I have just spoken, he
is a great land-owner and a descendant of the half-mythical Rurik; but
he has no official rank, and does not possess a single grand cordon.
In that respect he has followed in the footsteps of his father and
grandfather, who had something of the frondeur spirit, and preferred
the position of a grand seigneur and a country gentleman to that of
a tchinovnik and a courtier. In the Liberal camp he is regarded as
a Conservative, but he has little in common with the Krepostnik, who
declares that the reforms of the last half-century were a mistake,
that everything is going to the bad, that the emancipated serfs are all
sluggards, drunkards, and thieves, that the local self-government is an
ingenious machine for wasting money, and that the reformed law-courts
have conferred benefits only on the lawyers. On the contrary, he
recognises the necessity and beneficent results of the reforms, and
with regard to the future he has none of the despairing pessimism of the
incorrigible old Tory.

But in order that real progress should be made, he thinks that certain
current and fashionable errors must be avoide