"You look here! Look here! Just get me sand and I'll find ten men and have the work done in two days. Look here!"
Sand was brought, but two, four days, a week passed and still there yawned a ditch where the foundations were to be.
"I shall go mad," cried my wife furiously. "What wretches they are! What wretches!"
During these disturbances Victor Ivanich used to come and see us. He used to bring hampers of wine and dainties, and eat for a long time, and then go to sleep on the terrace and snore so that the labourers shook their heads and said:
"He's all right!"
Masha took no pleasure in his visits. She did not believe in him, and yet she used to ask his advice; when, after a sound sleep after dinner, he got up out of humour, and spoke disparagingly of our domestic arrangements, and said he was sorry he had ever bought Dubechnia which had cost him so much, and poor Masha looked miserably anxious and complained to him, he would yawn and say the peasants ought to be flogged.
He called our marriage and the life we were living a comedy, and used to say it was a caprice, a whimsy.
"She did the same sort of thing once before," he told me. "She fancied herself as an opera singer, and ran away from me. It took me two months to find her, and my dear fellow, I wasted a thousand roubles on telegrams alone."
He had dropped calling me a sectarian or the House-painter; and no longer approved of my life as a working man, but he used to say:
"You are a queer fish! An abnormality. I don't venture to prophesy, but you will end badly!"