`I don't agree that it's necessary or possible to raise the level of agriculture still higher,' said Levin. `I devote myself to it, and I have means, but I can do nothing. As to the banks, I don't know to whom they're any good. For my part, anyway, whatever I've spent money on in the way of husbandry has been a loss: stock - a loss, machinery - a loss.'

`That's true enough,' the gentleman with the gray mustaches chimed in, even laughing with satisfaction.

`And I'm not the only one,' pursued Levin. `I mix with all the neighboring landowners, who are cultivating their land on a rational system; they all, with rare exceptions, are doing so at a loss. Come, tell us how does your land do - does it pay?' said Levin, and at once in Sviiazhsky's eyes he detected that fleeting expression of alarm which he had noticed whenever he had tried to penetrate beyond the outer chambers of Sviiazhsky's mind.

Moreover, this question on Levin's part was not quite in good faith. Madame Sviiazhsky had just told him at tea that they had that summer invited a German expert accountant from Moscow, who for a consideration of five hundred roubles had investigated the management of their property, and found that it was costing them a loss of three thousand odd roubles. She did not remember the precise sum, but it appeared that the German had worked it out to the fraction of a kopeck.

The landowner smiled at the mention of the profits of Sviiazhsky's farming, obviously aware how much gain his neighbor and marshal was likely to be making.

`Possibly it does not pay,' answered Sviiazhsky. `That merely proves that either I'm a bad manager, or that I've sunk my capital for the increase of my rents.'

`Oh, rent!' Levin cried with horror. `Rent there may be in Europe, where land has been improved by the labor put into it; but with us all the land is deteriorating from the labor put into it - in other words, they're working it out; so there's no question of rent.'

`How - no rent? It's a law.'

`Then we're outside the law; rent explains nothing for us, but simply muddles us. No, tell me how there can be a theory of rent?...'

`Will you have some curded milk? Masha, pass us some curded milk or raspberries.' He turned to his wife. `The raspberries are lasting extraordinarily late this year.'

And in the happiest frame of mind Sviiazhsky got up and walked off, apparently supposing the conversation to have ended at the very point when to Levin it seemed that it was only just beginning.

Having lost his antagonist, Levin continued the conversation with the landowner, trying to prove to him that all the difficulty arises from the fact that we don't find out the peculiarities and habits of our laborer; but the landowner, like all men who think independently and in isolation, was slow in taking in any other person's thought, and particularly partial to his own. He stuck to it that the Russian peasant is a swine and likes swinishness, and that to get him out of his swinishness one must have authority, and there is none; one must have the stick, and we have become so liberal that we have all of a sudden replaced the stick, that served us for a thousand years, with lawyers and model prisons, where the worthless, stinking peasant is fed on good soup and has a fixed allowance of cubic feet of air.

`What makes you think,' said Levin, trying to get back to the question, `that it's impossible to find some relation to the laborer in which the labor would become productive?'

`That never could be so with the Russian people; we've no authority,' answered the landowner.

`How can new conditions be found?' said Sviiazhsky. Having eaten some curded milk and lighted a cigarette, he came back to the discussion. `All possible relations to the labor force have been defined and studied,' he