At all the evening parties, picnics, and dinners, Auntie Dasha was invariably the most interesting woman and the doctor the most interesting man.  There was very little reading either at the works or at the country-houses; they played only marches and polkas; and the young people always argued hotly about things they did not understand, and the effect was crude.  The discussions were loud and heated, but, strange to say, Vera had nowhere else met people so indifferent and careless as these.  They seemed to have no fatherland, no religion, no public interests.  When they talked of literature or debated some abstract question, it could be seen from Dr. Neshtchapov’s face that the question had no interest for him whatever, and that for long, long years he had read nothing and cared to read nothing.  Serious and expressionless, like a badly painted portrait, for ever in his white waistcoat, he was silent and incomprehensible as before; but the ladies, young and old, thought him interesting and were enthusiastic over his manners.  They envied Vera, who appeared to attract him very much.  And Vera always came away from the visits with a feeling of vexation, vowing inwardly to remain at home; but the day passed, the evening came, and she hurried off to the works again, and it was like that almost all the winter.

She ordered books and magazines, and used to read them in her room.  And she read at night, lying in bed.  When the clock in the corridor struck two or three, and her temples were beginning to ache from reading, she sat up in bed and thought, “What am I to do?  Where am I to go?” Accursed, importunate question, to which there were a number of ready-made answers, and in reality no answer at all.

Oh, how noble, how holy, how picturesque it must be to serve the people, to alleviate their sufferings, to enlighten them!  But she, Vera, did not know the people.  And how could she go to them?  They were strange and uninteresting to her; she could not endure the stuffy smell of the huts, the pot-house oaths, the unwashed children, the women’s talk of illnesses.  To walk over the snow-drifts, to feel cold, then to sit in a stifling hut, to teach children she disliked—­no, she would rather die!  And to teach the peasants’ children while Auntie Dasha made money out of the pot-houses and fined the peasants—­it was too great a farce!  What a lot of talk there was of schools, of village libraries, of universal education; but if all these engineers, these mine-owners and ladies of her acquaintance, had not been hypocrites, and really had believed that enlightenment was necessary, they would not have paid the schoolmasters fifteen roubles a month as they did now, and would not have let them go hungry.  And the schools and the talk about ignorance—­it was all only to stifle the voice of conscience because they were ashamed to own fifteen or thirty thousand acres and to be indifferent to the peasants’ lot.  Here the ladies said about Dr. Neshtchapov that he was a kind man and had