NATALYA STEPANOVNA. I can make you a present of them myself, because they’re mine! Your behaviour, Ivan Vassilevitch, is strange, to say the least! Up to this we have always thought of you as a good neighbour, a friend: last year we lent you our threshing-machine, although on that account we had to put off our own threshing till November, but you behave to us as if we were gipsies. Giving me my own land, indeed! No, really, that’s not at all neighbourly! In my opinion, it’s even impudent, if you want to know.... LOMOV. Then you make out that I’m a land-grabber? Madam, never in my life have I grabbed anybody else’s land, and I shan’t allow anybody to accuse me of having done so.... [Quickly steps to the carafe and drinks more water] Oxen Meadows are mine! NATALYA STEPANOVNA. It’s not true, they’re ours! LOMOV. Mine! NATALYA STEPANOVNA. It’s not true! I’ll prove it! I’ll send my mowers out to the Meadows this very day! LOMOV. What? NATALYA STEPANOVNA. My mowers will be there this very day! LOMOV. I’ll give it to them in the neck! NATALYA STEPANOVNA. You dare! LOMOV. [Clutches at his heart] Oxen Meadows are mine! You understand? Mine! NATALYA STEPANOVNA. Please don’t shout! You can shout yourself hoarse in your own house, but here I must ask you to restrain yourself! LOMOV. If it wasn’t, madam, for this awful, excruciating palpitation, if my whole inside wasn’t upset, I’d talk to you in a different way! [Yells] Oxen Meadows are mine! NATALYA STEPANOVNA. Ours! LOMOV. Mine! NATALYA STEPANOVNA. Ours! LOMOV. Mine! [Enter CHUBUKOV.] CHUBUKOV. What’s the matter? What are you shouting at? NATALYA STEPANOVNA. Papa, please tell to this gentleman who owns Oxen Meadows, we or he? CHUBUKOV. [To LOMOV] Darling, the Meadows are ours! LOMOV. But, please, Stepan Stepanitch, how can they be yours? Do be a reasonable man! My aunt’s grandmother gave the Meadows for the temporary and free use of your grandfather’s peasants. The peasants used the land for forty years and got as accustomed to it as if it was their own, when it happened that... CHUBUKOV. Excuse me, my precious.... You forget just this, that the peasants didn’t pay your grandmother and all that, because the Meadows were in dispute, and so on. And now everybody knows that they’re ours. It means that you haven’t seen the plan. LOMOV. I’ll prove to you that they’re mine! CHUBUKOV. You won’t prove it, my darling. LOMOV. I shall! CHUBUKOV. Dear one, why yell like that? You won’t prove anything just by yelling. I don’t want anything of yours, and don’t intend to give up what I have. Why should I? And you know, my beloved, that if you propose to go on arguing about it, I’d much sooner give up the meadows to the peasants than to you. There! LOMOV. I don’t understand! How have you the right to give away somebody else’s property?