Me they conducted to the hospital. Well, there of course ladies appeared upon the scene They revolved around me till I was able to stand on my legs again, and when I could do that I got the billet of secretary to the local police-station. Well, say what you will--to be associated with the police is more convenient than to be under police supervision. So there I lived for two or three months. It was in those days, for the first time in my life, that I had an attack of crushing, overwhelming ennui, that most horrible of all sensations to which humanity is liable.... Everything around you ceases to be of interest, and you desire something new. You cast about hither and thither, you seek and seek, you find something, you seize it, and immediately you discover it is not what you wanted. You feel yourself led captive by something dark, you feel yourself fettered within, you feel yourself incapable of living in the world with yourself, and yet this world is more necessary to a man than everything else. A wretched condition of things! And it brought me at last to such a pass that I married. Such a step in a man of my character is only possible in case of anguish or drunkard's head-ache. My wife was the daughter of a priest, who lived with her mother--her father was dead--and had the free disposition of her property. She had her own house, you might even say mansion, and she had money besides. She was a handsome girl, no fool, and of a lively disposition, but she was very fond of reading books, and this had a very bad effect both upon me and her. She was constantly fishing for rules of life in all sorts of little books, and whenever she got what she wanted, she immediately proceeded to apply k personally to us both. Now, from my tenderest years morality was a thing I never could endure.... At first I laughed at my wife, but afterwards it became tiresome to listen to her. I saw that she always made a great show of ideas extracted from various little books, and bookish lore is about as suitable for a woman as his master's cast-off costume is for a lackey. We began to quarrel.... Then I made the acquaintance of a certain priest--there was one of that sort there--a rogue who could play the guitar and sing, dance the _trepak_[2] to admiration, and take his skinful like a man. To my mind he was the best fellow in the town, because one could always live a jolly life in his company, and she--that is my wife--was always running him down, and always tried to drag me into the company of the Scribes and Pharisees who surrounded her. For in the evenings all the serious and best people in the town, as she called them, used to assemble at her house; and serious enough they all were, as serious, to my mind, as gallows-birds.... I also loved reading in those days, but I never used to trouble myself about what I read, and I don't understand why people should. But they--I mean my wife and those who were with her--whenever they had read through a book, immediately