“Do,” he said, screening his eyes.  “The really happy man is he who thinks not only of what is, but of what is not.”

“That was a long sentence which I did not quite understand.  You mean happy people live in their imagination.  Yes, that’s true.  I love to sit in your study in the evening and let my thoughts carry me far, far away. . . .  It’s pleasant sometimes to dream.  Let us dream aloud, George.”

“I’ve never been at a girls’ boarding-school; I never learnt the art.”

“You are out of humour?” said Zinaida Fyodorovna, taking Orlov’s hand.  “Tell me why.  When you are like that, I’m afraid.  I don’t know whether your head aches or whether you are angry with me. . . .”

Again there was a silence lasting several long minutes.

“Why have you changed?” she said softly.  “Why are you never so tender or so gay as you used to be at Znamensky Street?  I’ve been with you almost a month, but it seems to me as though we had not yet begun to live, and have not yet talked of anything as we ought to.  You always answer me with jokes or else with a long cold lecture like a teacher.  And there is something cold in your jokes. . . .  Why have you given up talking to me seriously?”

“I always talk seriously.”

“Well, then, let us talk.  For God’s sake, George. . . .  Shall we?”

“Certainly, but about what?”

“Let us talk of our life, of our future,” said Zinaida Fyodorovna dreamily.  “I keep making plans for our life, plans and plans—­and I enjoy doing it so! George, I’ll begin with the question, when are you going to give up your post?”

“What for?” asked Orlov, taking his hand from his forehead.

“With your views you cannot remain in the service.  You are out of place there.”

“My views?” Orlov repeated.  “My views?  In conviction and temperament I am an ordinary official, one of Shtchedrin’s heroes.  You take me for something different, I venture to assure you.”

“Joking again, George!”

“Not in the least.  The service does not satisfy me, perhaps; but, anyway, it is better for me than anything else.  I am used to it, and in it I meet men of my own sort; I am in my place there and find it tolerable.”

“You hate the service and it revolts you.”

“Indeed?  If I resign my post, take to dreaming aloud and letting myself be carried away into another world, do you suppose that that world would be less hateful to me than the service?”

“You are ready to libel yourself in order to contradict me.”  Zinaida Fyodorovna was offended and got up.  “I am sorry I began this talk.”

“Why are you angry?  I am not angry with you for not being an official.  Every one lives as he likes best.”

“Why, do you live as you like best?  Are you free?  To spend your life writing documents that are opposed to your own ideas,” Zinaida Fyodorovna went on, clasping her hands in despair:  “to submit to authority, congratulate your superiors at the New Year, and then cards and nothing but cards:  worst of all, to be working for a system which must be distasteful to you—­no, George, no!  You should not make such horrid jokes.  It’s dreadful.  You are a man of ideas, and you ought to be working for your ideas and nothing else.”