you don't go in and win."

His words made me feel uncomfortable, and with some embarrassment
I told him how I looked at love and women.

"I don't know," he sighed; "to my thinking, a woman's a woman and
a man's a man. Ariadne Grigoryevna may be poetical and exalted, as
you say, but it doesn't follow that she must be superior to the
laws of nature. You see for yourself that she has reached the age
when she must have a husband or a lover. I respect women as much
as you do, but I don't think certain relations exclude poetry.
Poetry's one thing and love is another. It's just the same as it
is in farming. The beauty of nature is one thing and the income
from your forests or fields is quite another."

When Ariadne and I were fishing, Lubkov would lie on the sand close
by and make fun of me, or lecture me on the conduct of life.

"I wonder, my dear sir, how you can live without a love affair,"
he would say. "You are young, handsome, interesting--in fact,
you're a man not to be sniffed at, yet you live like a monk. Och!
I can't stand these fellows who are old at twenty-eight! I'm nearly
ten years older than you are, and yet which of us is the younger?
Ariadne Grigoryevna, which?"

"You, of course," Ariadne answered him.

And when he was bored with our silence and the attention with which
we stared at our floats he went home, and she said, looking at me
angrily: