n Romanovitch, Ivan Romanovitch! A very bad mark for your
misbehaviour!

IRINA. That clock used to belong to our mother.

CHEBUTIKIN. Perhaps.... To your mother, your mother. Perhaps I didn't
break it; it only looks as if I broke it. Perhaps we only think that
we exist, when really we don't. I don't know anything, nobody knows
anything. [At the door] What are you looking at? Natasha has a little
romance with Protopopov, and you don't see it.... There you sit and see
nothing, and Natasha has a little romance with Protopovov.... [Sings]
Won't you please accept this date.... [Exit.]

VERSHININ. Yes. [Laughs] How strange everything really is! [Pause] When
the fire broke out, I hurried off home; when I get there I see the house
is whole, uninjured, and in no danger, but my two girls are standing by
the door in just their underclothes, their mother isn't there, the crowd
is excited, horses and dogs are running about, and the girls' faces are
so agitated, terrified, beseeching, and I don't know what else. My heart
was pained when I saw those faces. My God, I thought, what these girls
will have to put up with if they live long! I caught them up and ran,
and still kept on thinking the one thing: what they will have to live
through in this world! [Fire-alarm; a pause] I come here and find their
mother shouting and angry. [MASHA enters with a pillow and sits on
the sofa] And when my girls were standing by the door in just their
underclothes, and the street was red from the fire, there was a dreadful
noise, and I thought that something of the sort used to happen many
years ago when an enemy made a sudden attack, and looted, and burned....
And at the same time what a difference there really is between the
present and the past! And when a little more time has gone by, in two or
three hundred years perhaps, people will look at our present life with
just the same fear, and the same contempt, and the whole past will seem
clumsy and dull, and very uncomfortable, and strange. Oh, indeed, what a
life there will be, what a life! [Laughs] Forgive me, I've dropped
into philosophy again. Please let me continue. I do awfully want to
philosophize, it's just how I feel at present. [Pause] As if they
are all asleep. As I was saying: what a life there will be! Only just
imagine.... There are only three persons like yourselves in the town
just now, but in future generations there will be more and more, and
still more, and the time will come when e