Lubkov was fond of nature, but he regarded it as something long familiar and at the same time, in reality, infinitely beneath himself and created for his pleasure.  He would sometimes stand still before some magnificent landscape and say:  “It would be nice to have tea here.”

One day, seeing Ariadne walking in the distance with a parasol, he nodded towards her and said: 

“She’s thin, and that’s what I like; I don’t like fat women.”

This made me wince.  I asked him not to speak like that about women before me.  He looked at me in surprise and said: 

“What is there amiss in my liking thin women and not caring for fat ones?”

I made no answer.  Afterwards, being in very good spirits and a trifle elevated, he said: 

“I’ve noticed Ariadne Grigoryevna likes you.  I can’t understand why you don’t go in and win.”

His words made me feel uncomfortable, and with some embarrassment I told him how I looked at love and women.

“I don’t know,” he sighed; “to my thinking, a woman’s a woman and a man’s a man.  Ariadne Grigoryevna may be poetical and exalted, as you say, but it doesn’t follow that she must be superior to the laws of nature.  You see for yourself that she has reached the age when she must have a husband or a lover.  I respect women as much as you do, but I don’t think certain relations exclude poetry.  Poetry’s one thing and love is another.  It’s just the same as it is in farming.  The beauty of nature is one thing and the income from your forests or fields is quite another.”

When Ariadne and I were fishing, Lubkov would lie on the sand close by and make fun of me, or lecture me on the conduct of life.

“I wonder, my dear sir, how you can live without a love affair,” he would say.  “You are young, handsome, interesting—­in fact, you’re a man not to be sniffed at, yet you live like a monk.  Och!  I can’t stand these fellows who are old at twenty-eight!  I’m nearly ten years older than you are, and yet which of us is the younger?  Ariadne Grigoryevna, which?”

“You, of course,” Ariadne answered him.

And when he was bored with our silence and the attention with which we stared at our floats he went home, and she said, looking at me angrily: 

“You’re really not a man, but a mush, God forgive me!  A man ought to be able to be carried away by his feelings, he ought to be able to be mad, to make mistakes, to suffer!  A woman will forgive you audacity and insolence, but she will never forgive your reasonableness!”

She was angry in earnest, and went on: 

“To succeed, a man must be resolute and bold.  Lubkov is not so handsome as you are, but he is more interesting.  He will always succeed with women because he’s not like you; he’s a man. . . .”

And there was actually a note of exasperation in her voice.