`Only you mustn't be formal with her. It frightens her. No one ever spoke to her so but the justice of the peace who tried her for trying to get out of a house of ill fame. My God, what senselessness there is in this world!' he cried suddenly. `These new institutions, these justices of the peace, these Zemstvo - what hideousness it all is!'

And he began to enlarge on his encounters with the new institutions.

Konstantin Levin listened to him, and that disbelief in the sense of all public institutions, which he shared with him, and often expressed, was now distasteful to him, coming from his brother's lips.

`In the other world we shall understand it all,' he said lightly.

`In the other world? Ah, I don't like that other world! I don't like it,' he said, letting his scared wild eyes rest on his brother's face. `Here one would think that to get out of all the baseness and the mess, one's own and other people's, would be a good thing, and yet I'm afraid of death, awfully afraid of death.' He shuddered. `But do drink something. Would you like some champagne? Or shall we go somewhere? Let's go to the gypsies! Do you know, I've gotten very fond of the gypsies, and of Russian songs.'

His speech had begun to falter, and he skipped at random from one subject to another. Konstantin, with the help of Masha, persuaded him not to go out anywhere, and got him to bed hopelessly drunk.

Masha promised to write to Konstantin in case of need, and to persuade Nikolai to go and stay with his brother.


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