The family have, in short, all the conveniences and comforts which money and refinement can procure, but it cannot be said that they greatly enjoy the time spent in the country.  The Princess has no decided objection to it.  She is devoted to a little grandchild, is fond of reading and correspondence, amuses herself with a school and hospital which she has founded for the peasantry, and occasionally drives over to see her friend, the Countess N——­, who lives about fifteen miles off.

The Prince, however, finds country life excessively dull.  He does not care for riding or shooting, and he finds nothing else to do.  He knows nothing about the management of his estate, and holds consultations with the steward merely pro forma—­this estate and the others which he possesses in different provinces being ruled by a head-steward in St. Petersburg, in whom he has the most complete confidence.  In the vicinity there is no one with whom he cares to associate.  Naturally he is not a sociable man, and he has acquired a stiff, formal, reserved manner that is rarely met with in Russia.  This manner repels the neighbouring proprietors—­a fact that he does not at all regret, for they do not belong to his monde, and they have in their manners and habits a free-and-easy rusticity which is positively disagreeable to him.  His relations with them are therefore confined to formal calls.  The greater part of the day he spends in listless loitering, frequently yawning, regretting the routine of St. Petersburg life—­the pleasant chats with his colleagues, the opera, the ballet, the French theatre, and the quiet rubber at the Club Anglais.  His spirits rise as the day of his departure approaches, and when he drives off to the station he looks bright and cheerful.  If he consulted merely his own tastes he would never visit his estates at all, and would spend his summer holidays in Germany, France, or Switzerland, as he did in his bachelor days; but as a large landowner he considers it right to sacrifice his personal inclinations to the duties of his position.

There is, by the way, another princely magnate in the district, and I ought perhaps to introduce him to my readers, because he represents worthily a new type.  Like Prince S——­, of whom I have just spoken, he is a great land-owner and a descendant of the half-mythical Rurik; but he has no official rank, and does not possess a single grand cordon.  In that respect he has followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, who had something of the frondeur spirit, and preferred the position of a grand seigneur and a country gentleman to that of a tchinovnik and a courtier.  In the Liberal camp he is regarded as a Conservative, but he has little in common with the Krepostnik, who declares that the reforms of the last half-century were a mistake, that everything is going to the bad, that the emancipated serfs are all sluggards, drunkards, and thieves, that the local self-government is an ingenious machine for wasting money, and that the reformed law-courts have conferred benefits only on the lawyers.  On the contrary, he recognises the necessity and beneficent results of the reforms, and with regard to the future he has none of the despairing pessimism of the incorrigible old Tory.