The idea occurred to me to invite the neighbouring landowners and suggest to them to organize in my house something like a committee or a centre to which all subscriptions could be forwarded, and from which assistance and instructions could be distributed throughout the district; such an organization, which would render possible frequent consultations and free control on a big scale, would completely meet my views.  But I imagined the lunches, the dinners, the suppers and the noise, the waste of time, the verbosity and the bad taste which that mixed provincial company would inevitably bring into my house, and I made haste to reject my idea.

As for the members of my own household, the last thing I could look for was help or support from them.  Of my father’s household, of the household of my childhood, once a big and noisy family, no one remained but the governess Mademoiselle Marie, or, as she was now called, Marya Gerasimovna, an absolutely insignificant person.  She was a precise little old lady of seventy, who wore a light grey dress and a cap with white ribbons, and looked like a china doll.  She always sat in the drawing-room reading.

Whenever I passed by her, she would say, knowing the reason for my brooding: 

“What can you expect, Pasha?  I told you how it would be before.  You can judge from our servants.”

My wife, Natalya Gavrilovna, lived on the lower storey, all the rooms of which she occupied.  She slept, had her meals, and received her visitors downstairs in her own rooms, and took not the slightest interest in how I dined, or slept, or whom I saw.  Our relations with one another were simple and not strained, but cold, empty, and dreary as relations are between people who have been so long estranged, that even living under the same roof gives no semblance of nearness.  There was no trace now of the passionate and tormenting love—­at one time sweet, at another bitter as wormwood—­which I had once felt for Natalya Gavrilovna.  There was nothing left, either, of the outbursts of the past—­the loud altercations, upbraidings, complaints, and gusts of hatred which had usually ended in my wife’s going abroad or to her own people, and in my sending money in small but frequent instalments that I might sting her pride oftener. (My proud and sensitive wife and her family live at my expense, and much as she would have liked to do so, my wife could not refuse my money:  that afforded me satisfaction and was one comfort in my sorrow.) Now when we chanced to meet in the corridor downstairs or in the yard, I bowed, she smiled graciously.  We spoke of the weather, said that it seemed time to put in the double windows, and that some one with bells on their harness had driven over the dam.  And at such times I read in her face:  “I am faithful to you and am not disgracing your good name which you think so much about; you are sensible and do not worry me; we are quits.”