They adored each other. When one went into the garden, the other would stand on the terrace, and, looking towards the trees, call ‘Aa—oo, Genya!’ or ‘Mother, where are you?’ They always said their prayers together, and had the same faith; and they understood each other perfectly even when they did not speak. And their attitude to people was the same. Ekaterina Pavlovna, too, grew quickly used to me and fond of me, and when I did not come for two or three days, sent to ask if I were well. She, too, gazed at my sketches with enthusiasm, and with the same openness and readiness to chatter as Misuce, she told me what had happened, and confided to me her domestic secrets.

She had a perfect reverence for her elder daughter. Lida did not care for endearments, she talked only of serious matters; she lived her life apart, and to her mother and sister was as sacred and enigmatic a person as the admiral, always sitting in his cabin, is to the sailors.

‘Our Lida is a remarkable person,’ the mother would often say. ‘Isn’t she?’

Now, too, while it was drizzling with rain, we talked of Lida.

‘She is a remarkable girl,’ said her mother, and added in an undertone, like a conspirator, looking about her timidly: ‘You wouldn’t easily find another like her; only, do you know, I am beginning to be a little uneasy. The school, the dispensary, books—all that’s very good, but why go to extremes? She is three-and- twenty, you know; it’s time for her to think seriously of herself. With her books and her dispensary she will find life has slipped by without having noticed it. … She must be married.’

Genya, pale from reading, with her hair disarranged, raised her head and said as it were to herself, looking at her mother:

‘Mother, everything is in God’s hands.’

And again she buried herself in her book.

Byelokurov came in his tunic and embroidered shirt. We played croquet and tennis, then when it got dark, sat a long time over supper and talked again about schools, and about Balagin, who had the whole district under his thumb. As I went away from the Voltchaninovs that evening, I carried away the impression of a long, long idle day, with a melancholy consciousness that everything ends in this world, however long it may be.

Genya saw us out to the gate, and perhaps because she had been with me all day, from morning till night, I felt dull without her, and that all that charming family were near and dear to me, and for the first time that summer I had a yearning to paint.

‘Tell me, why do you lead such a dreary, colourless life?’ I asked Byelokurov as I went home. ‘My life is dreary, difficult, and monotonous because I am an artist, a strange person. From my earliest days I’ve been wrung by envy, self-dissatisfaction, distrust in my work. I’m always poor, I’m a wanderer, but you—you’re a healthy, normal man, a landowner, and a gentleman. Why do you live in such an uninteresting way? Why do you get so little out of life? Why haven’t you, for instance, fallen in love with Lida or Genya?’

‘You forget that I love another woman,’ answered Byelokurov.

He was referring to Liubov Ivanovna, the lady who shared the lodge with him. Every day I saw this lady, very plump, rotund, and dignified, not unlike a fat goose, walking about the garden, in the Russian national dress and beads, always carrying a parasol; and the servant was continually calling her in to dinner or to tea. Three years before she had taken one of the lodges for a summer holiday, and had settled down at Byelokurov’s apparently for ever. She was ten years older than he was, and kept a sharp hand over him, so much so that he had to ask her permission when he went out of the house. She often sobbed in a deep masculine note, and then I used to send word to her that if she did not leave off, I should give up my rooms there; and she left off.