MARY IVÁNOVNA. Tell them I can't come. Go, go! VÁNYA. Do come! [He runs off]. NICHOLAS IVÁNOVICH. You don't wish to see eye to eye--nor to understand me. MARY IVÁNOVNA. It is not that I don't wish to, but that I can't. NICHOLAS IVÁNOVICH. No, you don't wish to, and we drift further and further apart. Only enter into my feelings; put yourself for a moment in my place, and you will understand. First, the whole life here is thoroughly depraved. You are vexed with the expression, but I can give no other name to a life built wholly on robbery; for the money you live on is taken from the land you have stolen from the peasants. Moreover, I see that this life is demoralising the children: "Whoso shall cause one of these little ones to stumble," and I see how they are perishing and becoming depraved before my very eyes. I cannot bear it when grown-up men dressed up in swallow-tail coats serve us as if they were slaves. Every dinner we have is a torture to me. MARY IVÁNOVNA. But all this was so before. Is it not done by everyone--both here and abroad? NICHOLAS IVÁNOVICH. But _I_ can't do it. Since I realised that we are all brothers, I cannot see it without suffering. MARY IVÁNOVNA. That is as you please. One can invent anything. NICHOLAS IVÁNOVICH [hotly] It's just this want of understanding that is so terrible. Take for instance to-day! I spent this morning at Rzhánov's lodging-house, among the outcasts there; and I saw an infant literally die of hunger; a boy suffering from alcoholism; and a consumptive charwoman rinsing clothes outside in the cold. Then I returned home, and a footman with a white tie opens the door for me. I see my son--a mere lad--ordering that footman to fetch him some water; and I see the army of servants who work for us. Then I go to visit Borís--a man who is sacrificing his life for truth's sake. I see how he, a pure, strong, resolute man, is deliberately being goaded to lunacy and to destruction, that the Government may be rid of him! I know, and they know, that his heart is weak, and so they provoke him, and drag him to a ward for raving lunatics. It is too dreadful, too dreadful. And when I come home, I hear that the one member of our family who understood--not me but the truth--has thrown over both her betrothed to whom she had promised her love, and the truth, and is going to marry a lackey, a liar ... MARY IVÁNOVNA. How very Christian! NICHOLAS IVÁNOVICH. Yes, it is wrong of me, and I am to blame, but I only want you to put yourself in my place. I mean to say that she has turned from the truth ... MARY IVÁNOVNA. You say, "from the truth"; but other people--the majority--say from "an error." You see Vasíly Nikonórovich once thought he was in error, but now has come back to the Church. NICHOLAS IVÁNOVICH. That's impossible ----