Orlov leaves his cellar, as he calls it, and accepts a
position in the hospital where they are taking care of cholera
patients. His devotion makes him an "indispensable man;" he is
reborn, and, according to his own words, he is "ripe for life." It
seems as if his end were going to be attained. But not so.
Restlessness seizes him again. Orlov questions the value of his
work. He saves sick people from the cholera. Is he doing good? The
greatest care is taken of these people, but how many people are
there outside of the hospitals, one hundred times as many as there
are inside, who are just as unfortunate, but, in spite of that fact,
are not helped by any one?

"While you live," he declares, "no one will refuse to give you a
drink of water. And if you are near death, not only will they not
allow you to die, but they will go to some expense to stop you. They
organize hospitals.... They give you wine at 'six and a half rubles
a bottle.' The sick man gets well, the doctors are happy, and Orlov
would like to share their joy; but he cannot, for he knows that, on
leaving the threshold of the hospital, a life 'worse than the
convulsions of the cholera' awaits the convalescent...." And again
he is seized by the desire to drink, and to be a vagabond, and by a
wish to experience new sensations.

* * * * *

These, then, are the vagabonds whom we can class in the category of
the "restless." After these, come those whom the author terms the
"ex-men," and whom he studies, under this title, in one of his
longest stories. The ex-men are closely related to the "restless;"
however, they differ from them in that they push their opinions to
an extreme, for they are, more than the others, miserable and at bay
against society.

"What difference would it make if it all went to the devil," one of
them philosophizes--"I should like to see the earth go to pieces
suddenly, provided that I should perish the last, after having seen
the others die.... I'm an ex-man, am I not? I am a pariah, then,
estranged from all bonds and duties.... I can spit on everything!"

Thomas Gordeyev's father develops another thesis; a rich and
rational bourgeois, he tries to inculcate in his son from his
infancy--a son who later augments the ranks of the "restless"--the
most perfect spirit of egotism.

"You must pity people," he says, "but do it with discernment. First,
look at a man, see what good you can get out of him, and see what