“Of course, it is difficult to live with a woman if you don’t love her,” said Samoylenko, shaking the sand out of his boots.  “But one must look at the thing humanely, Vanya.  If it were my case, I should never show a sign that I did not love her, and I should go on living with her till I died.”

He was at once ashamed of his own words; he pulled himself up and said: 

“But for aught I care, there might be no females at all.  Let them all go to the devil!”

The friends dressed and went into the pavilion.  There Samoylenko was quite at home, and even had a special cup and saucer.  Every morning they brought him on a tray a cup of coffee, a tall cut glass of iced water, and a tiny glass of brandy.  He would first drink the brandy, then the hot coffee, then the iced water, and this must have been very nice, for after drinking it his eyes looked moist with pleasure, he would stroke his whiskers with both hands, and say, looking at the sea: 

“A wonderfully magnificent view!”

After a long night spent in cheerless, unprofitable thoughts which prevented him from sleeping, and seemed to intensify the darkness and sultriness of the night, Laevsky felt listless and shattered.  He felt no better for the bathe and the coffee.

“Let us go on with our talk, Alexandr Daviditch,” he said.  “I won’t make a secret of it; I’ll speak to you openly as to a friend.  Things are in a bad way with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and me . . . a very bad way!  Forgive me for forcing my private affairs upon you, but I must speak out.”

Samoylenko, who had a misgiving of what he was going to speak about, dropped his eyes and drummed with his fingers on the table.

“I’ve lived with her for two years and have ceased to love her,” Laevsky went on; “or, rather, I realised that I never had felt any love for her. . . .  These two years have been a mistake.”

It was Laevsky’s habit as he talked to gaze attentively at the pink palms of his hands, to bite his nails, or to pinch his cuffs.  And he did so now.

“I know very well you can’t help me,” he said.  “But I tell you, because unsuccessful and superfluous people like me find their salvation in talking.  I have to generalise about everything I do.  I’m bound to look for an explanation and justification of my absurd existence in somebody else’s theories, in literary types—­in the idea that we, upper-class Russians, are degenerating, for instance, and so on.  Last night, for example, I comforted myself by thinking all the time:  ‘Ah, how true Tolstoy is, how mercilessly true!’ And that did me good.  Yes, really, brother, he is a great writer, say what you like!”

Samoylenko, who had never read Tolstoy and was intending to do so every day of his life, was a little embarrassed, and said: 

“Yes, all other authors write from imagination, but he writes straight from nature.”