“That’s clever, very clever!  If I want to marry a rich, vulgar woman, she ought to prevent me from such a shabby action by hastening to make me an offer herself!”

The brother and sister talked till midnight without understanding each other.  If any outsider had overheard them he would hardly have been able to make out what either of them was driving at.

They usually spent the evening at home.  There were no friends’ houses to which they could go, and they felt no need for friends; they only went to the theatre when there was a new play—­such was the custom in literary circles—­they did not go to concerts, for they did not care for music.

“You may think what you like,” Vera Semyonovna began again the next day, “but for me the question is to a great extent settled.  I am firmly convinced that I have no grounds for resisting evil directed against me personally.  If they want to kill me, let them.  My defending myself will not make the murderer better.  All I have now to decide is the second half of the question:  how I ought to behave to evil directed against my neighbours?”

“Vera, mind you don’t become rabid!” said Vladimir Semyonitch, laughing.  “I see non-resistance is becoming your idee fixe!”

He wanted to turn off these tedious conversations with a jest, but somehow it was beyond a jest; his smile was artificial and sour.  His sister gave up sitting beside his table and gazing reverently at his writing hand, and he felt every evening that behind him on the sofa lay a person who did not agree with him.  And his back grew stiff and numb, and there was a chill in his soul.  An author’s vanity is vindictive, implacable, incapable of forgiveness, and his sister was the first and only person who had laid bare and disturbed that uneasy feeling, which is like a big box of crockery, easy to unpack but impossible to pack up again as it was before.

Weeks and months passed by, and his sister clung to her ideas, and did not sit down by the table.  One spring evening Vladimir Semyonitch was sitting at his table writing an article.  He was reviewing a novel which described how a village schoolmistress refused the man whom she loved and who loved her, a man both wealthy and intellectual, simply because marriage made her work as a schoolmistress impossible.  Vera Semyonovna lay on the sofa and brooded.

“My God, how slow it is!” she said, stretching.  “How insipid and empty life is!  I don’t know what to do with myself, and you are wasting your best years in goodness knows what.  Like some alchemist, you are rummaging in old rubbish that nobody wants.  My God!”

Vladimir Semyonitch dropped his pen and slowly looked round at his sister.

“It’s depressing to look at you!” said his sister.  “Wagner in ‘Faust’ dug up worms, but he was looking for a treasure, anyway, and you are looking for worms for the sake of the worms.”

“That’s vague!”