At first Ivan Petrovich kept silence, and maintained his hold over himself; but when his father thought fit to threaten him with a disgraceful punishment, he could bear it no longer.  “Ah!” he thought, “the infidel Diderot is going to be brought forward again.  Well, then, I will put his teaching in action.”  And so with a quiet and even voice, although with a secret shuddering in all his limbs, he told his father that it was a mistake to accuse him of immorality; that he had no intention of justifying his fault, but that he was ready to make amends for it, and that all the more willingly, inasmuch as he felt himself superior to all prejudices; and, in fact—­that he was ready to marry Malania.  In uttering these words Ivan Petrovich undoubtedly attained the end he had in view.  Peter Andreich was so confounded that he opened his eyes wide, and for a moment was struck dumb; but he immediately recovered his senses, and then and there, just as he was, wrapped in a dressing-gown trimmed with squirrels’ fur, and with slippers on his bare feet, he rushed with clenched fists at his son, who, as if on purpose, had dressed his hair that day a la Titus, and had put on a blue dress-coat, quite new and made in the English fashion, tasselled boots, and dandified, tight-fitting buckskin pantaloons.  Anna Pavlovna uttered a loud shriek, and hid her face in her hands; meanwhile her son ran right through the house, jumped into the court-yard, threw himself first into the kitchen garden and then into the flower garden, flew across the park into the road, and ran and ran, without once looking back, until at last he ceased to hear behind him the sound of his father’s heavy feet, the loud and broken cries with which his father sobbed out, “Stop, villain!  Stop, or I will curse you!”

Ivan Petrovich took refuge in the house of a neighbor,[A] and his father returned home utterly exhausted, and bathed in perspiration.  There he announced, almost before he had given himself time to recover breath, that he withdrew his blessing and his property from his son, whose stupid books he condemned to be burnt; and he gave orders to have the girl Malania sent, with out delay, to a distant village.  Some good people found out where Ivan Petrovich was, and told him everything.  Full of shame and rage, he swore vengeance upon his father; and that very night, having lain in wait for the peasant’s cart on which Malania was being sent away, he carried her off by force, galloped with her to the nearest town, and there married her.  He was supplied with the necessary means by a neighbor, a hard-drinking, retired sailor, who was exceedingly good-natured, and a very great lover of all “noble histories,” as he called them.

[Footnote A:  Literally, “of a neighboring Odnodvorets.”  That word signifies one who belongs by descent to the class of nobles and proprietors, but who has no serfs belonging to him, and is really a moujik, or peasant.  Some villages are composed of inhabitants of this class, who are often intelligent, though uneducated.]