had gone away to Moscow to enter the Conservatoire, he grew calmer
and lived as before.

Afterwards, remembering sometimes how he had wandered about the
cemetery or how he had driven all over the town to get a dress suit,
he stretched lazily and said:

"What a lot of trouble, though!"

IV

Four years had passed. Startsev already had a large practice in the
town. Every morning he hurriedly saw his patients at Dyalizh, then
he drove in to see his town patients. By now he drove, not with a
pair, but with a team of three with bells on them, and he returned
home late at night. He had grown broader and stouter, and was not
very fond of walking, as he was somewhat asthmatic. And Panteleimon
had grown stout, too, and the broader he grew, the more mournfully
he sighed and complained of his hard luck: he was sick of driving!
Startsev used to visit various households and met many people, but
did not become intimate with any one. The inhabitants irritated him
by their conversation, their views of life, and even their appearance.
Experience taught him by degrees that while he played cards or
lunched with one of these people, the man was a peaceable, friendly,
and even intelligent human being; that as soon as one talked of
anything not eatable, for instance, of politics or science, he would
be completely at a loss, or would expound a philosophy so stupid
and ill-natured that there was nothing else to do but wave one's
hand in despair and go away. Even when Startsev tried to talk to
liberal citizens, saying, for instance, that humanity, thank God,