“My God!” sighed Laevsky; “how distorted we all are by civilisation!  I fell in love with a married woman and she with me. . . .  To begin with, we had kisses, and calm evenings, and vows, and Spencer, and ideals, and interests in common. . . .  What a deception!  We really ran away from her husband, but we lied to ourselves and made out that we ran away from the emptiness of the life of the educated class.  We pictured our future like this:  to begin with, in the Caucasus, while we were getting to know the people and the place, I would put on the Government uniform and enter the service; then at our leisure we would pick out a plot of ground, would toil in the sweat of our brow, would have a vineyard and a field, and so on.  If you were in my place, or that zoologist of yours, Von Koren, you might live with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna for thirty years, perhaps, and might leave your heirs a rich vineyard and three thousand acres of maize; but I felt like a bankrupt from the first day.  In the town you have insufferable heat, boredom, and no society; if you go out into the country, you fancy poisonous spiders, scorpions, or snakes lurking under every stone and behind every bush, and beyond the fields—­mountains and the desert.  Alien people, an alien country, a wretched form of civilisation—­all that is not so easy, brother, as walking on the Nevsky Prospect in one’s fur coat, arm-in-arm with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, dreaming of the sunny South.  What is needed here is a life and death struggle, and I’m not a fighting man.  A wretched neurasthenic, an idle gentleman . . . .  From the first day I knew that my dreams of a life of labour and of a vineyard were worthless.  As for love, I ought to tell you that living with a woman who has read Spencer and has followed you to the ends of the earth is no more interesting than living with any Anfissa or Akulina.  There’s the same smell of ironing, of powder, and of medicines, the same curl-papers every morning, the same self-deception.”

“You can’t get on in the house without an iron,” said Samoylenko, blushing at Laevsky’s speaking to him so openly of a lady he knew.  “You are out of humour to-day, Vanya, I notice.  Nadyezhda Fyodorovna is a splendid woman, highly educated, and you are a man of the highest intellect.  Of course, you are not married,” Samoylenko went on, glancing round at the adjacent tables, “but that’s not your fault; and besides . . . one ought to be above conventional prejudices and rise to the level of modern ideas.  I believe in free love myself, yes. . . .  But to my thinking, once you have settled together, you ought to go on living together all your life.”

“Without love?”

“I will tell you directly,” said Samoylenko.  “Eight years ago there was an old fellow, an agent, here—­a man of very great intelligence.  Well, he used to say that the great thing in married life was patience.  Do you hear, Vanya?  Not love, but patience.  Love cannot last long.  You have lived two years in love, and now evidently your married life has reached the period when, in order to preserve equilibrium, so to speak, you ought to exercise all your patience. . . .”