“How can one discern what doesn’t exist?” asked the doctor.

“We think so because we don’t see it.”

“Is that so?  The social movements are the invention of the new literature.  There are none among us.”

An argument began.

“There are no deep social movements among us and never have been,” the doctor declared loudly.  “There is no end to what the new literature has invented!  It has invented intellectual workers in the country, and you may search through all our villages and find at the most some lout in a reefer jacket or a black frock-coat who will make four mistakes in spelling a word of three letters.  Cultured life has not yet begun among us.  There’s the same savagery, the same uniform boorishness, the same triviality, as five hundred years ago.  Movements, currents there have been, but it has all been petty, paltry, bent upon vulgar and mercenary interests—­and one cannot see anything important in them.  If you think you have discerned a deep social movement, and in following it you devote yourself to tasks in the modern taste, such as the emancipation of insects from slavery or abstinence from beef rissoles, I congratulate you, Madam.  We must study, and study, and study and we must wait a bit with our deep social movements; we are not mature enough for them yet; and to tell the truth, we don’t know anything about them.”

“You don’t know anything about them, but I do,” said Mariya Viktorovna.  “Goodness, how tiresome you are to-day!”

“Our duty is to study and to study, to try to accumulate as much knowledge as possible, for genuine social movements arise where there is knowledge; and the happiness of mankind in the future lies only in knowledge.  I drink to science!”

“There is no doubt about one thing:  one must organize one’s life somehow differently,” said Mariya Viktorovna, after a moment’s silence and thought.  “Life, such as it has been hitherto, is not worth having.  Don’t let us talk about it.”

As we came away from her the cathedral clock struck two.

“Did you like her?” asked the doctor; “she’s nice, isn’t she?”

On Christmas day we dined with Mariya Viktorovna, and all through the holidays we went to see her almost every day.  There was never anyone there but ourselves, and she was right when she said that she had no friends in the town but the doctor and me.  We spent our time for the most part in conversation; sometimes the doctor brought some book or magazine and read aloud to us.  In reality he was the first well-educated man I had met in my life:  I cannot judge whether he knew a great deal, but he always displayed his knowledge as though he wanted other people to share it.  When he talked about anything relating to medicine he was not like any one of the doctors in our town, but made a fresh, peculiar impression upon me, and I fancied that if he liked he might have become a real man of science.  And he was perhaps the only