Chapter 29 - Page 2

Papa was not at home, he would take his
book into that meal, and go on reading it without addressing so
much as a single word to any one of us, who felt, somehow, guilty
in his presence. In the evening, too, he would stretch himself on
a settee in the drawing-room, and either go to sleep, propped on
his elbow, or tell us farcical stories--sometimes stories so
improper as to make Mimi grow angry and blush, and ourselves die
with laughter. At other times he would not condescend to address
a single serious word to any member of the family except Papa or
(occasionally) myself. Involuntarily I offended against his view
of girls, seeing that I was not so afraid of seeming affectionate
as he, and, moreover, had not such a profound and confirmed
contempt for young women. Yet several times that summer, when
driven by lack of amusement to try and engage Lubotshka and
Katenka in conversation, I always encountered in them such an
absence of any capacity for logical thinking, and such an
ignorance of the simplest, most ordinary matters (as, for
instance, the nature of money, the subjects studied at
universities, the effect of war, and so forth), as well as such
indifference to my explanations of such matters, that these
attempts of mine only ended in confirming my unfavourable opinion
of feminine ability.

I remember one evening when Lubotshka kept repeating some
unbearably tedious passage on the piano about a hundred times in
succession, while Woloda, who was dozing on a settee in the
drawing-room, kept addressing no one in particular as
he muttered, "Lord! how she murders it! WHAT a musician! WHAT a
Beethoven!" (he always pronounced the composer's name with
especial irony). "Wrong again! Now--a second time! That's it!"
and so on. Meanwhile Katenka and I were sitting by the tea-table,
and somehow she began to talk about her favourite subject--love.
I was in the right frame of mind to philosophise, and began by
loftily defining love as the wish to acquire in another what one
does not possess in oneself. To this Katenka retorted that, on
the contrary, love is not love at all if a girl desires to marry
a man for his money alone, but that, in her opinion, riches were
a vain thing, and true love only the affection which can stand
the test of separation (this I took to be a hint concerning her
love for Dubkoff). At this point Woloda, who must have been
listening all the time, raised himself on his elbow, and cried
out some rubbish or another; and I felt that he was right.

Apart from the general faculties (more or less developed in
different persons) of intellect, sensibility, and artistic
feeling, there also exists (more or less developed in different
circles of society, and