“It’s all mother’s fault!” she says, wiping away her tears with her dinner napkin. “Everyone advised her to send me to the high school, and from the high school I should have been sure to go on to the University!”

“University⁠ ⁠… high school,” mutters Somov. “That’s running to extremes, my girl! What’s the good of being a blue stocking! A blue stocking is the very deuce! Neither man nor woman, but just something midway: neither one thing nor another⁠ ⁠… I hate blue stockings! I would never have married a learned woman.⁠ ⁠…”

“There’s no making you out⁠ ⁠…” says Lidotchka. “You are angry because I am not learned, and at the same time you hate learned women; you are annoyed because I have no ideas in my letter, and yet you yourself are opposed to my studying.⁠ ⁠…”

“You do catch me up at a word, my dear,” yawns Somov, pouring out a second glass of vodka in his boredom.

Under the influence of vodka and a good dinner, Somov grows more good-humoured, lively, and soft.⁠ ⁠… He watches his pretty wife making the salad with an anxious face and a rush of affection for her, of indulgence and forgiveness comes over him.

“It was stupid of me to depress her, poor girl⁠ ⁠… ,” he thought. “Why did I say such a lot of dreadful things? She is silly, that’s true, uncivilised and narrow; but⁠ ⁠… there are two sides to the question, and audiatur et altera pars .⁠ ⁠… Perhaps people are perfectly right when they say that woman’s shallowness rests on her very vocation. Granted that it is her vocation to love her husband, to bear children, and to mix salad, what the devil does she want with learning? No, indeed!”

At that point he remembers that learned women are usually tedious, that they are exacting, strict, and unyielding; and, on the other hand, how easy it is to get on with silly Lidotchka, who never pokes her nose into anything, does not understand so much, and never obtrudes her criticism. There is peace and comfort with Lidotchka, and no risk of being interfered with.