XVIII.
"Yes, I digress all the time," he began. "Much have I thought over. At many things I now look differently, and I feel like telling about this. Well, we began to live in the city. A man may live a hundred years in the city without perceiving that he has long been dead and decayed. There is no time to balance one's own accounts,—one is too busy with affairs, society obligations, health, art, the children's health, their education. Now you must receive this and that person, now you must visit this and that one; and now again you must look at such and such a one, or listen to what they have to say. In the city there are, at any given moment, one, two, or three celebrities whom you cannot afford to miss. Now you have to cure yourself, or this or that child; and now you have to look for teachers, tutors, governesses, but in reality it is dreadfully empty. Well, thus we lived and felt less the pain of our companionship. Besides, at first we had admirable occupations: getting fixed in the new city and in our new apartments, and our migrations from the city to the country, and from the country back again to the city.
"We passed one winter in this way, but the next winter there happened the following apparently insignificant incident, which was not taken notice of by any one, but which produced that which later took place.
"She was not in good health, and the doctors told her that she must have no children, and taught her how to keep from having them. This disgusted me. I fought against it, but she insisted upon it with frivolous stubbornness, and I had to submit; the last justification of a
367
