ANDREY. If you weren’t, I don’t suppose I should talk to you. I’ve got to talk to somebody, and my wife doesn’t understand me, and I’m a bit afraid of my sisters--I don’t know why unless it is that they may make fun of me and make me feel ashamed... I don’t drink, I don’t like public-houses, but how I should like to be sitting just now in Tyestov’s place in Moscow, or at the Great Moscow, old fellow! FERAPONT. Moscow? That’s where a contractor was once telling that some merchants or other were eating pancakes; one ate forty pancakes and he went and died, he was saying. Either forty or fifty, I forget which. ANDREY. In Moscow you can sit in an enormous restaurant where you don’t know anybody and where nobody knows you, and you don’t feel all the same that you’re a stranger. And here you know everybody and everybody knows you, and you’re a stranger... and a lonely stranger. FERAPONT. What? And the same contractor was telling--perhaps he was lying--that there was a cable stretching right across Moscow. ANDREY. What for? FERAPONT. I can’t tell. The contractor said so. ANDREY. Rubbish. [He reads] Were you ever in Moscow? FERAPONT. [After a pause] No. God did not lead me there. [Pause] Shall I go? ANDREY. You may go. Good-bye. [FERAPONT goes] Good-bye. [Reads] You can come to-morrow and fetch these documents.... Go along.... [Pause] He’s gone. [A ring] Yes, yes.... [Stretches himself and slowly goes into his own room.] [Behind the scene the nurse is singing a lullaby to the child. MASHA and VERSHININ come in. While they talk, a maidservant lights candles and a lamp.] MASHA. I don’t know. [Pause] I don’t know. Of course, habit counts for a great deal. After father’s death, for instance, it took us a long time to get used to the absence of orderlies. But, apart from habit, it seems to me in all fairness that, however it may be in other towns, the best and most-educated people are army men. VERSHININ. I’m thirsty. I should like some tea. MASHA. [Glancing at her watch] They’ll bring some soon. I was given in marriage when I was eighteen, and I was afraid of my husband because he was a teacher and I’d only just left school. He then seemed to me frightfully wise and learned and important. And now, unfortunately, that has changed. VERSHININ. Yes... yes. MASHA. I don’t speak of my husband, I’ve grown used to him, but civilians in general are so often coarse, impolite, uneducated. Their rudeness offends me, it angers me. I suffer when I see that a man isn’t quite sufficiently refined, or delicate, or polite. I simply suffer agonies when I happen to be among schoolmasters, my husband’s colleagues.