“No, I am here permanently,” answered Nikitin.  “I am a teacher at the school.”

“You don’t say so?” said the doctor, with surprise.  “So young and already a teacher?”

“Young, indeed!  My goodness, I’m twenty-six!

“You have a beard and moustache, but yet one would never guess you were more than twenty-two or twenty-three.  How young-looking you are!”

“What a beast!” thought Nikitin.  “He, too, takes me for a whipper-snapper!”

He disliked it extremely when people referred to his youth, especially in the presence of women or the schoolboys.  Ever since he had come to the town as a master in the school he had detested his own youthful appearance.  The schoolboys were not afraid of him, old people called him “young man,” ladies preferred dancing with him to listening to his long arguments, and he would have given a great deal to be ten years older.

From the garden they went on to the Shelestovs’ farm.  There they stopped at the gate and asked the bailiff’s wife, Praskovya, to bring some new milk.  Nobody drank the milk; they all looked at one another, laughed, and galloped back.  As they rode back the band was playing in the suburban garden; the sun was setting behind the cemetery, and half the sky was crimson from the sunset.

Masha again rode beside Nikitin.  He wanted to tell her how passionately he loved her, but he was afraid he would be overheard by the officers and Varya, and he was silent.  Masha was silent, too, and he felt why she was silent and why she was riding beside him, and was so happy that the earth, the sky, the lights of the town, the black outline of the brewery—­all blended for him into something very pleasant and comforting, and it seemed to him as though Count Nulin were stepping on air and would climb up into the crimson sky.

They arrived home.  The samovar was already boiling on the table, old Shelestov was sitting with his friends, officials in the Circuit Court, and as usual he was criticizing something.

“It’s loutishness!” he said.  “Loutishness and nothing more.  Yes!”

Since Nikitin had been in love with Masha, everything at the Shelestovs’ pleased him:  the house, the garden, and the evening tea, and the wickerwork chairs, and the old nurse, and even the word “loutishness,” which the old man was fond of using.  The only thing he did not like was the number of cats and dogs and the Egyptian pigeons, who moaned disconsolately in a big cage in the verandah.  There were so many house-dogs and yard-dogs that he had only learnt to recognize two of them in the course of his acquaintance with the Shelestovs:  Mushka and Som.  Mushka was a little mangy dog with a shaggy face, spiteful and spoiled.  She hated Nikitin:  when she saw him she put her head on one side, showed her teeth, and began:  “Rrr . . . nga-nga-nga . . . rrr . . . !” Then she would get under his chair, and when he would try to drive her away she would go off into piercing yaps, and the family would say:  “Don’t be frightened.  She doesn’t bite.  She is a good dog.”