Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses violence against women, domestic abuse, suicide, underage sex, and sex work.

Note: The parenthetical citations reference the chapter number and paragraph number, respectively.

An unnamed narrator is traveling by train and sharing a carriage with several strangers. Three passengers are, like him, bound for the furthest stop: a lawyer, his lady companion, and Pozdnychev. Other passengers come and go from the carriage through the course of the journey and make conversation, although Pozdnychev remains silent and “aloof.”

Several passengers—the lawyer, the lady, an old merchant, and a young clerk—begin to discuss the current state of marriage. The old merchant attributes a recent increase in the prevalence of conjugal separation to people becoming “too learned” and the fact that wives no longer fear their husbands, as he believes is necessary. The lady asserts that such fear is a thing of the past, and that things have improved since the days of arranged marriages because couples can now marry for love. The old merchant disagrees and argues that it is the husband’s duty to dominate his wife into submission and to force her to love him if she does not.

The clerk tells of his employer’s separation from his wife.