Dawn was already beginning, and that was especially perceptible from the distinctness with which the coils of smoke and the tops of the trees began to stand out in the air.

“It’s time we were asleep, though,” said Tanya, “and it’s cold, too.”  She took his arm.  “Thank you for coming, Andryusha.  We have only uninteresting acquaintances, and not many of them.  We have only the garden, the garden, the garden, and nothing else.  Standards, half-standards,” she laughed.  “Aports, Reinettes, Borovinkas, budded stocks, grafted stocks. . . .  All, all our life has gone into the garden.  I never even dream of anything but apples and pears.  Of course, it is very nice and useful, but sometimes one longs for something else for variety.  I remember that when you used to come to us for the summer holidays, or simply a visit, it always seemed to be fresher and brighter in the house, as though the covers had been taken off the lustres and the furniture.  I was only a little girl then, but yet I understood it.”

She talked a long while and with great feeling.  For some reason the idea came into his head that in the course of the summer he might grow fond of this little, weak, talkative creature, might be carried away and fall in love; in their position it was so possible and natural!  This thought touched and amused him; he bent down to her sweet, preoccupied face and hummed softly: 

             “’Onyegin, I won’t conceal it;
                I madly love Tatiana. . . .’”

By the time they reached the house, Yegor Semyonitch had got up.  Kovrin did not feel sleepy; he talked to the old man and went to the garden with him.  Yegor Semyonitch was a tall, broad-shouldered, corpulent man, and he suffered from asthma, yet he walked so fast that it was hard work to hurry after him.  He had an extremely preoccupied air; he was always hurrying somewhere, with an expression that suggested that if he were one minute late all would be ruined!

“Here is a business, brother . . .” he began, standing still to take breath.  “On the surface of the ground, as you see, is frost; but if you raise the thermometer on a stick fourteen feet above the ground, there it is warm. . . .  Why is that?”

“I really don’t know,” said Kovrin, and he laughed.

“H’m! . . .  One can’t know everything, of course. . . .  However large the intellect may be, you can’t find room for everything in it.  I suppose you still go in chiefly for philosophy?”

“Yes, I lecture in psychology; I am working at philosophy in general.”

“And it does not bore you?”

“On the contrary, it’s all I live for.”

“Well, God bless you! . . .” said Yegor Semyonitch, meditatively stroking his grey whiskers.  “God bless you! . . .  I am delighted about you . . . delighted, my boy. . . .”

But suddenly he listened, and, with a terrible face, ran off and quickly disappeared behind the trees in a cloud of smoke.