Genya, pale from reading, with her hair disarranged, raised her head and said as it were to herself, looking at her mother: 

“Mother, everything is in God’s hands.”

And again she buried herself in her book.

Byelokurov came in his tunic and embroidered shirt.  We played croquet and tennis, then when it got dark, sat a long time over supper and talked again about schools, and about Balagin, who had the whole district under his thumb.  As I went away from the Voltchaninovs that evening, I carried away the impression of a long, long idle day, with a melancholy consciousness that everything ends in this world, however long it may be.

Genya saw us out to the gate, and perhaps because she had been with me all day, from morning till night, I felt dull without her, and that all that charming family were near and dear to me, and for the first time that summer I had a yearning to paint.

“Tell me, why do you lead such a dreary, colourless life?” I asked Byelokurov as I went home.  “My life is dreary, difficult, and monotonous because I am an artist, a strange person.  From my earliest days I’ve been wrung by envy, self-dissatisfaction, distrust in my work.  I’m always poor, I’m a wanderer, but you—­you’re a healthy, normal man, a landowner, and a gentleman.  Why do you live in such an uninteresting way?  Why do you get so little out of life?  Why haven’t you, for instance, fallen in love with Lida or Genya?”

“You forget that I love another woman,” answered Byelokurov.

He was referring to Liubov Ivanovna, the lady who shared the lodge with him.  Every day I saw this lady, very plump, rotund, and dignified, not unlike a fat goose, walking about the garden, in the Russian national dress and beads, always carrying a parasol; and the servant was continually calling her in to dinner or to tea.  Three years before she had taken one of the lodges for a summer holiday, and had settled down at Byelokurov’s apparently forever.  She was ten years older than he was, and kept a sharp hand over him, so much so that he had to ask her permission when he went out of the house.  She often sobbed in a deep masculine note, and then I used to send word to her that if she did not leave off, I should give up my rooms there; and she left off.

When we got home Byelokurov sat down on the sofa and frowned thoughtfully, and I began walking up and down the room, conscious of a soft emotion as though I were in love.  I wanted to talk about the Voltchaninovs.

“Lida could only fall in love with a member of the Zemstvo, as devoted to schools and hospitals as she is,” I said.  “Oh, for the sake of a girl like that one might not only go into the Zemstvo, but even wear out iron shoes, like the girl in the fairy tale.  And Misuce?  What a sweet creature she is, that Misuce!”

Byelokurov, drawling out “Er—­er,” began a long-winded disquisition on the malady of the age—­pessimism.  He talked confidently, in a tone that suggested that I was opposing him.  Hundreds of miles of desolate, monotonous, burnt-up steppe cannot induce such deep depression as one man when he sits and talks, and one does not know when he will go.