So how should you know if I do not? And I love life, I believe in
God. I wish to meet Death. One can be serious without being absurd at
an early hour like this, when nothing is real except such things....
Andrey Vassilievitch and myself have puzzled you, have we not? I have
seen you watching us very seriously, as though we were figures in a
novel, and that has amazed me, because you must not be solemn about
us. You'll understand nothing about Russian life unless you laugh at
it during at least half the week.
"Almost five years ago I met Andrey Vassilievitch at a friend's house
in Petrograd. He was an acquaintance of mine of some years' duration,
but I had avoided him because he seemed to me the last kind of man
whom I would ever care to know. I had been at this time five years in
Petrograd and had now a good practice there as a surgeon. I was a
successful man and I knew it, but I was also a disappointed man
because my idealism, that was being for ever wounded by my own
actions, would not die.
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