Chapter 17 - Page 2

although Papa
sometimes entertained him in his study, old Grap never came to
dinner with us. With his subserviency and begging propensities
went such a faculty of good-humour and a power of making himself
at home that every one looked upon his attachment to us as a
great honour. For my part, however, I never liked him, and felt
ashamed when he was speaking.

I was much put out by the arrival of these visitors, and made no
effort to conceal the fact. Upon Ilinka I had been so used to
look down, and he so used to recognise my right to do so, that it
displeased me to think that he was now as much a matriculated
student as myself. In some way he appeared to me to have made a
POINT of attaining that equality. I greeted the pair coldly, and,
without offering them any refreshment (since it went against the
grain to do so, and I thought they could ask for anything, if
they wanted it, without my first inviting them to state their
requirements), gave orders for the drozhki to be got ready.
Ilinka was a good-natured, extremely moral, and far from stupid
young fellow; yet, for all that, what people call a person of
moods. That is to say, for no apparent reason he was for ever in
some PRONOUNCED frame of mind--now lachrymose, now frivolous, now
touchy on the very smallest point. At the present moment he
appeared to be in the last-named mood. He kept looking from his
father to myself without speaking, except when directly
addressed, at which times he smiled the self-deprecatory, forced
smile under which he was accustomed to conceal his feelings, and
more especially that feeling of shame for his father which he
must have experienced in our house.

"So, Nicolas Petrovitch," the old man said to me, following me
everywhere about the room as I went through the operation of
dressing, while all the while his fat fingers kept turning over
and over a silver snuff-box with which my grandmother had once
presented me, "as soon as ever I heard from my son that you had
passed your examinations so well (though of course your abilities
are well-known to everyone), I at once came to congratulate you,
my dear boy. Why, I have carried you on my shoulders before now,
and God knows that I love you as though you were my own son. My
Ilinka too has always been fond of you, and feels quite at home
with you."

Meanwhile the said Ilinka remained sitting silently by the
window, apparently absorbed in contemplation of my three-cornered
cap, and every now and then angrily muttering something in an
undertone.

"Now, I also wanted to ask you, Nicolas Petrovitch." His father
went on, "whether my son did well in the examinations? He tells
me that he is going to be in the same