Chapter 11 - Page 2

"mere candidate's" soul was filled with envy
and admiration of them. I was charmed to think that every one
near me could now see that I knew two real second-course
students: wherefore I hastened to meet them half-way.

Woloda, of course, could not help vaunting his superiority a
little.

"Hullo, you smug!" he said. "Haven't you been examined yet?"

"No."

"Well, what are you reading? Aren't you sufficiently primed?"

"Yes, except in two questions. I don't understand them at all."

"Eh, what?"--and Woloda straightway began to expound to me
Newton's Binomial, but so rapidly and unintelligibly that,
suddenly reading in my eyes certain misgivings as to the
soundness of his knowledge, he glanced also at Dimitri's face.
Clearly, he saw the same misgivings there, for he blushed hotly,
though still continuing his involved explanations.

"No; hold on, Woloda, and let me try and do it," put in Dimitri
at length, with a glance at the professors' corner as he seated
himself beside me.

I could see that my friend was in the best of humours. This was
always the case with him when he was satisfied with himself, and
was one of the things in him which I liked best. Inasmuch as he
knew mathematics well and could speak clearly, he hammered the
question so thoroughly into my head that I can remember it to
this day. Hardly had he finished when St. Jerome said to me in a
loud whisper, "A vous, Nicolas," and I followed Ikonin out from
among the desks without having had an opportunity of going
through the OTHER question of which I was ignorant. At the table
which we now approached were seated two professors, while before
the blackboard stood a gymnasium student, who was working some
formula aloud, and knocking bits off the end of the chalk with
his too vigorous strokes. He even continued writing after one of
the Professors had said to him "Enough!" and bidden us draw our
tickets. "Suppose I get the Theory of Combinations?" I thought to
myself as my tremulous fingers took a ticket from among a bundle
wrapped in torn paper. Ikonin, for his part, reached across the
table with the same assurance, and the same sidelong movement of
his whole body, as he had done at the previous examination.
Taking the topmost ticket without troubling to make further
selection, he just glanced at it, and then frowned angrily.

"I always draw this kind of thing," he muttered.

I looked at mine. Horrors! It was the Theory of Combinations!

"What have you got?" whispered Ikonin at this point.

I showed him.

"Oh, I know that," he said.