The Duel and Other Stories

While his restless wife watches, the chemist snores contentedly, smiling at his dream -- that the whole village has a cough and are buying his curative syrup!

Then she hears outside two shadowed figures, a doctor and an officer, talking between themselves . . . about the chemist with the oversized jaw of an ass, and his ever-so-contrasting, so-fetching wife! Then the doorbell rings. Soon the chemist's wife finds herself hosting a small midnight party, gazing upon their ruddy faces and listening to their chatter -- and soon she, too, grows quite lively. Oh, she feels so gay! The dead weight pressing her down on this heavy summer night lifts completely . . .

Chekhov's unerring insight into the turbulent emotions that stir men and women, in "The Chemist's Wife" and the others to be found within The Duel and Other Stories, instills his gemlike fiction with a still-undiminished power.