“When I am mowing, I feel, do you know, healthier and more normal,” he said.  “If I were forced to confine myself to an intellectual life I believe I should go out of my mind.  I feel that I was not born to be a man of culture!  I ought to mow, plough, sow, drive out the horses.”

And Pyotr Dmitritch began a conversation with the ladies about the advantages of physical labour, about culture, and then about the pernicious effects of money, of property.  Listening to her husband, Olga Mihalovna, for some reason, thought of her dowry.

“And the time will come, I suppose,” she thought, “when he will not forgive me for being richer than he.  He is proud and vain.  Maybe he will hate me because he owes so much to me.”

She stopped near Colonel Bukryeev, who was eating raspberries and also taking part in the conversation.

“Come,” he said, making room for Olga Mihalovna and Pyotr Dmitritch.  “The ripest are here. . . .  And so, according to Proudhon,” he went on, raising his voice, “property is robbery.  But I must confess I don’t believe in Proudhon, and don’t consider him a philosopher.  The French are not authorities, to my thinking—­God bless them!”

“Well, as for Proudhons and Buckles and the rest of them, I am weak in that department,” said Pyotr Dmitritch.  “For philosophy you must apply to my wife.  She has been at University lectures and knows all your Schopenhauers and Proudhons by heart. . . .”

Olga Mihalovna felt bored again.  She walked again along a little path by apple and pear trees, and looked again as though she was on some very important errand.  She reached the gardener’s cottage.  In the doorway the gardener’s wife, Varvara, was sitting together with her four little children with big shaven heads.  Varvara, too, was with child and expecting to be confined on Elijah’s Day.  After greeting her, Olga Mihalovna looked at her and the children in silence and asked: 

“Well, how do you feel?”

“Oh, all right. . . .”

A silence followed.  The two women seemed to understand each other without words.

“It’s dreadful having one’s first baby,” said Olga Mihalovna after a moment’s thought.  “I keep feeling as though I shall not get through it, as though I shall die.”

“I fancied that, too, but here I am alive.  One has all sorts of fancies.”

Varvara, who was just going to have her fifth, looked down a little on her mistress from the height of her experience and spoke in a rather didactic tone, and Olga Mihalovna could not help feeling her authority; she would have liked to have talked of her fears, of the child, of her sensations, but she was afraid it might strike Varvara as naive and trivial.  And she waited in silence for Varvara to say something herself.

“Olya, we are going indoors,” Pyotr Dmitritch called from the raspberries.

Olga Mihalovna liked being silent, waiting and watching Varvara.  She would have been ready to stay like that till night without speaking or having any duty to perform.  But she had to go.  She had hardly left the cottage when Lubotchka, Nata, and Vata came running to meet her.  The sisters stopped short abruptly a couple of yards away; Lubotchka ran right up to her and flung herself on her neck.