“They say you have been in the province of Poltava?” Lubotchka questioned him.

“Yes,” answered Pyotr Dmitritch.  “I came back the day before yesterday.”

“I expect it is very nice there.”

“Yes, it is very nice, very nice indeed; in fact, I arrived just in time for the haymaking, I must tell you, and in the Ukraine the haymaking is the most poetical moment of the year.  Here we have a big house, a big garden, a lot of servants, and a lot going on, so that you don’t see the haymaking; here it all passes unnoticed.  There, at the farm, I have a meadow of forty-five acres as flat as my hand.  You can see the men mowing from any window you stand at.  They are mowing in the meadow, they are mowing in the garden.  There are no visitors, no fuss nor hurry either, so that you can’t help seeing, feeling, hearing nothing but the haymaking.  There is a smell of hay indoors and outdoors.  There’s the sound of the scythes from sunrise to sunset.  Altogether Little Russia is a charming country.  Would you believe it, when I was drinking water from the rustic wells and filthy vodka in some Jew’s tavern, when on quiet evenings the strains of the Little Russian fiddle and the tambourines reached me, I was tempted by a fascinating idea—­to settle down on my place and live there as long as I chose, far away from Circuit Courts, intellectual conversations, philosophizing women, long dinners. . . .”

Pyotr Dmitritch was not lying.  He was unhappy and really longed to rest.  And he had visited his Poltava property simply to avoid seeing his study, his servants, his acquaintances, and everything that could remind him of his wounded vanity and his mistakes.

Lubotchka suddenly jumped up and waved her hands about in horror.

“Oh!  A bee, a bee!” she shrieked.  “It will sting!”

“Nonsense; it won’t sting,” said Pyotr Dmitritch.  “What a coward you are!”

“No, no, no,” cried Lubotchka; and looking round at the bees, she walked rapidly back.

Pyotr Dmitritch walked away after her, looking at her with a softened and melancholy face.  He was probably thinking, as he looked at her, of his farm, of solitude, and—­who knows?—­perhaps he was even thinking how snug and cosy life would be at the farm if his wife had been this girl—­young, pure, fresh, not corrupted by higher education, not with child. . . .

When the sound of their footsteps had died away, Olga Mihalovna came out of the shanty and turned towards the house.  She wanted to cry.  She was by now acutely jealous.  She could understand that her husband was worried, dissatisfied with himself and ashamed, and when people are ashamed they hold aloof, above all from those nearest to them, and are unreserved with strangers; she could understand, also, that she had nothing to fear from Lubotchka or from those women who were now drinking coffee indoors.  But everything in general was terrible, incomprehensible, and it already seemed to Olga Mihalovna that Pyotr Dmitritch only half belonged to her.