Page:The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (volume IV).djvu/102

 buildings aren't up to much, and the workmen look confirmed loafers; while the superintendent is either a fool, or a knave, I haven't quite found out which yet.'

'You are rather hard on everything to-day, Yevgeny Vassilyevitch.'

'And the dear good peasants are taking your father in to a dead certainty. You know the Russian proverb, "The Russian peasant will cheat God Himself."'

'I begin to agree with my uncle,' remarked Arkady; 'you certainly have a poor opinion of Russians.'

'As though that mattered! The only good point in a Russian is his having the lowest possible opinion of himself. What does matter is that two and two make four, and the rest is all foolery.'

'And is nature foolery?' said Arkady, looking pensively at the bright-coloured fields in the distance, in the beautiful soft light of the sun, which was not yet high up in the sky.

'Nature, too, is foolery in the sense you understand it. Nature's not a temple, but a workshop, and man's the workman in it.'

At that instant, the long drawn notes of a violoncello floated out to them from the house. Some one was playing Schubert's Expectation with much feeling, though with an untrained