One evening, coming out of the doctors' club with an official with
whom he had been playing cards, he could not resist saying:

"If only you knew what a fascinating woman I made the acquaintance
of in Yalta!"

The official got into his sledge and was driving away, but turned
suddenly and shouted:

"Dmitri Dmitritch!"

"What?"

"You were right this evening: the sturgeon was a bit too strong!"

These words, so ordinary, for some reason moved Gurov to indignation,
and struck him as degrading and unclean. What savage manners, what
people! What senseless nights, what uninteresting, uneventful days!
The rage for card-playing, the gluttony, the drunkenness, the
continual talk always about the same thing. Useless pursuits and
conversations always about the same things absorb the better part
of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end
there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial,
and there is no escaping or getting away from it--just as though
one were in a madhouse or a prison.

Gurov did not sleep all night, and was filled with indignation. And
he had a headache all next day. And the next night he slept badly;
he sat up in bed, thinking, or paced up and down his room. He was
sick of his children, sick of the bank; he had no desire to go