there are here in this town twenty-eight doctors?  They’ve all made their fortunes, and they are living in houses of their own, and meanwhile the population is in just as helpless a condition as ever.  Here, Nina had to have an operation, quite an ordinary one really, yet we were obliged to get a surgeon from Moscow; not one doctor here would undertake it.  It’s beyond all conception.  They know nothing, they understand nothing.  They take no interest in anything.  Ask them, for instance, what cancer is—­what it is, what it comes from.”

And Panaurov began to explain what cancer was.  He was a specialist on all scientific subjects, and explained from a scientific point of view everything that was discussed.  But he explained it all in his own way.  He had a theory of his own about the circulation of the blood, about chemistry, about astronomy.  He talked slowly, softly, convincingly.

“It’s beyond all conception,” he pronounced in an imploring voice, screwing up his eyes, sighing languidly, and smiling as graciously as a king, and it was evident that he was very well satisfied with himself, and never gave a thought to the fact that he was fifty.

“I am rather hungry,” said Laptev.  “I should like something savoury.”

“Well, that can easily be managed.”

Not long afterwards Laptev and his brother-in-law were sitting upstairs in the dining-room having supper.  Laptev had a glass of vodka, and then began drinking wine.  Panaurov drank nothing.  He never drank, and never gambled, yet in spite of that he had squandered all his own and his wife’s property, and had accumulated debts.  To squander so much in such a short time, one must have, not passions, but a special talent.  Panaurov liked dainty fare, liked a handsome dinner service, liked music after dinner, speeches, bowing footmen, to whom he would carelessly fling tips of ten, even twenty-five roubles.  He always took part in all lotteries and subscriptions, sent bouquets to ladies of his acquaintance on their birthdays, bought cups, stands for glasses, studs, ties, walking-sticks, scents, cigarette-holders, pipes, lap-dogs, parrots, Japanese bric-a-brac, antiques; he had silk nightshirts, and a bedstead made of ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl.  His dressing-gown was a genuine Bokhara, and everything was to correspond; and on all this there went every day, as he himself expressed, “a deluge” of money.

At supper he kept sighing and shaking his head.

“Yes, everything on this earth has an end,” he said softly, screwing up his dark eyes.  “You will fall in love and suffer.  You will fall out of love; you’ll be deceived, for there is no woman who will not deceive; you will suffer, will be brought to despair, and will be faithless too.  But the time will come when all this will be a memory, and when you will reason about it coldly and look upon it as utterly trivial. . . .”

Laptev, tired, a little drunk, looked at his handsome head, his clipped black beard, and seemed to understand why women so loved this pampered, conceited, and physically handsome creature.