‘You are a very good man, Nikolay Stepanovitch,’ she says. ‘You are a rare specimen, and there isn’t an actor who would understand how to play you. Me or Mihail Fyodorovitch, for instance, any poor actor could do, but not you. And I envy you, I envy you horribly! Do you know what I stand for? What?’

She ponders for a minute, and then asks me:

‘Nikolay Stepanovitch, I am a negative phenomenon! Yes?’

‘Yes,’ I answer.

‘H’m! what am I to do?’

What answer was I to make her? It is easy to say ‘work’, or ‘give your possessions to the poor’, or ‘know yourself’, and because it is so easy to say that, I don’t know what to answer.

My colleagues when they teach therapeutics advise ‘the individual study of each separate case’. One has but to obey this advice to gain the conviction that the methods recommended in the textbooks as the best and as providing a safe basis for treatment turn out to be quite unsuitable in individual cases. It is just the same in moral ailments.

But I must make some answer, and I say:

‘You have too much free time, my dear; you absolutely must take up some occupation. After all, why shouldn’t you be an actress again if it is your vocation?’

‘I cannot!’

‘Your tone and manner suggest that you are a victim. I don’t like that, my dear; it is your own fault. Remember, you began with falling out with people and methods, but you have done nothing to make either better. You did not struggle with evil, but were cast down by it, and you are not the victim of the struggle, but of your own impotence. Well, of course you were young and inexperienced then; now it may all be different. Yes, really, go on the stage. You will work, you will serve a sacred art.’

‘Don’t pretend, Nikolay Stepanovitch,’ Katya interrupts me. ‘Let us make a compact once for all; we will talk about actors, actresses, and authors, but we will let art alone. You are a splendid and rare person, but you don’t know enough about art sincerely to think it sacred. You have no instinct or feeling for art. You have been hard at work all your life, and have not had time to acquire that feeling. Altogether … I don’t like talk about art,’ she goes on nervously. ‘I don’t like it! And, my goodness, how they have vulgarized it!’

‘Who has vulgarized it?’

‘They have vulgarized it by drunkenness, the newspapers by their familiar attitude, clever people by philosophy.’

‘Philosophy has nothing to do with it.’

‘Yes, it has. If anyone philosophizes about it, it shows he does not understand it.’

To avoid bitterness I hasten to change the subject, and then sit a long time silent. Only when we are driving out of the wood and turning towards Katya’s villa I go back to my former question, and say:

‘You have still not answered me, why you don’t want to go on the stage.’