Yulia Sergeyevna went out, and after staying a little longer, Laptev said good-bye to the doctor and went home.  When a man is dissatisfied and feels unhappy, how trivial seem to him the shapes of the lime-trees, the shadows, the clouds, all the beauties of nature, so complacent, so indifferent!  By now the moon was high up in the sky, and the clouds were scudding quickly below.  “But how naive and provincial the moon is, how threadbare and paltry the clouds!” thought Laptev.  He felt ashamed of the way he had talked just now about medicine, and the night-refuge.  He felt with horror that next day he would not have will enough to resist trying to see her and talk to her again, and would again be convinced that he was nothing to her.  And the day after—­it would be the same.  With what object?  And how and when would it all end?

At home he went in to see his sister.  Nina Fyodorovna still looked strong and gave the impression of being a well-built, vigorous woman, but her striking pallor made her look like a corpse, especially when, as now, she was lying on her back with her eyes closed; her eldest daughter Sasha, a girl of ten years old, was sitting beside her reading aloud from her reading-book.

“Alyosha has come,” the invalid said softly to herself.

There had long been established between Sasha and her uncle a tacit compact, to take turns in sitting with the patient.  On this occasion Sasha closed her reading-book, and without uttering a word, went softly out of the room.  Laptev took an historical novel from the chest of drawers, and looking for the right page, sat down and began reading it aloud.

Nina Fyodorovna was born in Moscow of a merchant family.  She and her two brothers had spent their childhood and early youth, living at home in Pyatnitsky Street.  Their childhood was long and wearisome; her father treated her sternly, and had even on two or three occasions flogged her, and her mother had had a long illness and died.  The servants were coarse, dirty, and hypocritical; the house was frequented by priests and monks, also hypocritical; they ate and drank and coarsely flattered her father, whom they did not like.  The boys had the good-fortune to go to school, while Nina was left practically uneducated.  All her life she wrote an illegible scrawl, and had read nothing but historical novels.  Seventeen years ago, when she was twenty-two, on a summer holiday at Himki, she made the acquaintance of her present husband, a landowner called Panaurov, had fallen in love with him, and married him secretly against her father’s will.  Panaurov, a handsome, rather impudent fellow, who whistled and lighted his cigarette from the holy lamp, struck the father as an absolutely worthless person.  And when the son-in-law began in his letters demanding a dowry, the old man wrote to his daughter that he would send her furs, silver, and various articles that had been left at her mother’s death, as well as thirty thousand roubles, but without his paternal blessing.  Later he sent another twenty thousand.  This money, as well as the dowry, was spent; the estate had been sold and Panaurov moved with his family to the town and got a job in a provincial government office.  In the town he formed another tie, and had a second family, and this was the subject of much talk, as his illicit family was not a secret.