Sometimes Pavel even found his property a burden.
"Why in the world did I get the Dubrovino estate?" he would complain. "What good is it?"
"What's the matter with Dubrovino? The soil is good, there's plenty of everything. What's got into your head of a sudden?"
"This, that nowadays there's no use having any estate. Money, that's the thing. You take your money, put it in your pocket and off you go. But real estate——"
"What sort of an age have we come to when there's no use owning real estate?"
"Yes, this is a peculiar age. You don't read the newspapers, but I do. Nowadays the lawyers are everywhere—you can imagine the rest. If a lawyer finds out that you have real estate, then he begins to circle around you."
"Well, how is he going to get at you when you have the proper deeds to the property?"
"Deeds or no deeds, they'll get you. Porfiry the Bloodsucker may hire a lawyer and serve me with summons after summons."
"What are you talking about! We're not living in a lawless country."
"That's just why they serve summonses on you. If the country were lawless, they would take it away without a summons. There's my friend Gorlopiatov, for instance. His uncle died and he, fool that he was, up and accepted the inheritance. The inheritance proved worthless, but the debts figured up to the thousands, the bills of exchange were all false. Now they've been suing him for three years on end. First, they took his uncle's estate. Then they even sold his own property at auction. That's what real estate is."