In this clean little room, with pictures of Venice on the walls, and a mirror between the two windows, there stood a clean bed with a spring mattress, and by the side of it a small table, with a decanter of water, matches, and an extinguisher.  On a table by the looking-glass lay his open portmanteau, with his dressing-case and some books in it; a Russian book, The Investigation of the Laws of Criminality, and a German and an English book on the same subject, which he meant to read while travelling in the country.  But it was too late to begin to-day, and he began preparing to go to bed.

An old-fashioned inlaid mahogany arm-chair stood in the corner of the room, and this chair, which Nekhludoff remembered standing in his mother’s bedroom, suddenly raised a perfectly unexpected sensation in his soul.  He was suddenly filled with regret at the thought of the house that would tumble to ruin, and the garden that would run wild, and the forest that would be cut down, and all these farmyards, stables, sheds, machines, horses, cows which he knew had cost so much effort, though not to himself, to acquire and to keep.  It had seemed easy to give up all this, but now it was hard, not only to give this, but even to let the land and lose half his income.  And at once a consideration, which proved that it was unreasonable to let the land to the peasants, and thus to destroy his property, came to his service.  “I must not hold property in land.  If I possess no property in land, I cannot keep up the house and farm.  And, besides, I am going to Siberia, and shall not need either the house or the estate,” said one voice.  “All this is so,” said another voice, “but you are not going to spend all your life in Siberia.  You may marry, and have children, and must hand the estate on to them in as good a condition as you received it.  There is a duty to the land, too.  To give up, to destroy everything is very easy; to acquire it very difficult.  Above all, you must consider your future life, and what you will do with yourself, and you must dispose of your property accordingly.  And are you really firm in your resolve?  And then, are you really acting according to your conscience, or are you acting in order to be admired of men?” Nekhludoff asked himself all this, and had to acknowledge that he was influenced by the thought of what people would say about him.  And the more he thought about it the more questions arose, and the more unsolvable they seemed.

In hopes of ridding himself of these thoughts by failing asleep, and solving them in the morning when his head would be fresh, he lay down on his clean bed.  But it was long before he could sleep.  Together with the fresh air and the moonlight, the croaking of the frogs entered the room, mingling with the trills of a couple of nightingales in the park and one close to the window in a bush of lilacs in bloom.  Listening to the nightingales and the frogs, Nekhludoff remembered the inspector’s daughter, and her music, and