“To shoot oneself in the Zemstvo hut, how tactless!” said the doctor.  “If one does want to put a bullet through one’s brains, one ought to do it at home in some outhouse.”

He sank on to a bench, just as he was, in his cap, his fur coat, and his felt overboots; his fellow-traveler, the examining magistrate, sat down opposite.

“These hysterical, neurasthenic people are great egoists,” the doctor went on hotly.  “If a neurasthenic sleeps in the same room with you, he rustles his newspaper; when he dines with you, he gets up a scene with his wife without troubling about your presence; and when he feels inclined to shoot himself, he shoots himself in a village in a Zemstvo hut, so as to give the maximum of trouble to everybody.  These gentlemen in every circumstance of life think of no one but themselves!  That’s why the elderly so dislike our ‘nervous age.’”

“The elderly dislike so many things,” said the examining magistrate, yawning.  “You should point out to the elder generation what the difference is between the suicides of the past and the suicides of to-day.  In the old days the so-called gentleman shot himself because he had made away with Government money, but nowadays it is because he is sick of life, depressed....  Which is better?”

“Sick of life, depressed; but you must admit that he might have shot himself somewhere else.”

“Such trouble!” said the constable, “such trouble!  It’s a real affliction.  The people are very much upset, your honor; they haven’t slept these three nights.  The children are crying.  The cows ought to be milked, but the women won’t go to the stall—­they are afraid... for fear the gentleman should appear to them in the darkness.  Of course they are silly women, but some of the men are frightened too.  As soon as it is dark they won’t go by the hut one by one, but only in a flock together.  And the witnesses too....”

Dr. Startchenko, a middle-aged man in spectacles with a dark beard, and the examining magistrate Lyzhin, a fair man, still young, who had only taken his degree two years before and looked more like a student than an official, sat in silence, musing.  They were vexed that they were late.  Now they had to wait till morning, and to stay here for the night, though it was not yet six o’clock; and they had before them a long evening, a dark night, boredom, uncomfortable beds, beetles, and cold in the morning; and listening to the blizzard that howled in the chimney and in the loft, they both thought how unlike all this was the life which they would have chosen for themselves and of which they had once dreamed, and how far away they both were from their contemporaries, who were at that moment walking about the lighted streets in town without noticing the weather, or were getting ready for the theatre, or sitting in their studies over a book.  Oh, how much they would have given now only to stroll along the Nevsky Prospect, or along Petrovka in Moscow, to listen to decent singing, to sit for an hour or so in a restaurant!