We can continue our game later. [To her son] Come, Constantine, leave your writing and come to supper.
Treplieff. I don’t want anything to eat, mother; I am not hungry.
Arkadina. As you please. [She wakes Sorin] Come to supper, Peter. [She takes Shamraeff’s arm] Let me tell you about my reception in Kharkoff.
Paulina blows out the candles on the table, then she and Dorn roll Sorin’s chair out of the room, and all go out through the door on the left, except Treplieff, who is left alone. Treplieff prepares to write. He runs his eye over what he has already written.
Treplieff. I have talked a great deal about new forms of art, but I feel myself gradually slipping into the beaten track. [He reads] “The placard cried it from the wall—a pale face in a frame of dusky hair”—cried—frame—that is stupid. [He scratches out what he has written] I shall begin again from the place where my hero is wakened by the noise of the rain, but what follows must go. This description of a moonlight night is long and stilted. Trigorin has worked out a process of his own, and descriptions are easy for him. He writes that the neck of a broken bottle lying on the bank glittered in the moonlight, and that the shadows lay black under the mill-wheel. There you have a moonlight night before your eyes, but I speak of the shimmering light, the twinkling stars, the distant sounds of a piano melting into the still and scented air, and the result is abominable. [A pause] The conviction is gradually forcing itself upon me that good literature is not a question of forms new or old, but of ideas that must pour freely from the author’s heart, without his bothering his head about any forms whatsoever. [A knock is heard at the window nearest the table] What was that? [He looks out of the window] I can’t see anything. [He opens the glass door and looks out into
