that he understood her position in the house, but he felt that between him and her there existed a barrier which she dared not and could not destroy.  He felt shy of his father, who, on his part, never caressed him.  His grandfather sometimes smoothed his hair and gave him his hand to kiss, but called him a savage and thought him a fool.  After Malania’s death, his aunt took him regularly in hand.  Fedia feared her, feared her bright sharp eyes, her cutting voice; he never dared to make the slightest noise in her presence; if by chance he stirred ever so little on his chair, she would immediately exclaim in her hissing voice, “Where are you going? sit still!”

On Sundays, after mass, he was allowed to play—­that is to say, a thick book was given to him, a mysterious book, the work of a certain Maksimovich-Ambodik, bearing the title of “Symbols and Emblems.”  In this book there were to be found about a thousand, for the most part, very puzzling pictures, with equally puzzling explanations in five languages.  Cupid, represented with a naked and chubby body, played a great part in these pictures.  To one of them, the title of which was “Saffron and the Rainbow,” was appended the explanation, “The effect of this is great.”  Opposite another, which represented “A Stork, flying with a violet in its beak,” stood this motto, “To thee they are all known;” and “Cupid, and a bear licking its cub,” was styled “Little by Little.”  Fedia used to pore over these pictures.  He was familiar with them all even to their minutest details.  Some of them—­it was always the same ones—­made him reflect, and excited his imagination:  of other diversions he knew nothing.

When the time came for teaching him languages and music, Glafira Petrovna hired an old maid for a mere trifle, a Swede, whose eyes looked sideways, like a hare’s, who spoke French and German more or less badly, played the piano so so, and pickled cucumbers to perfection.  In the company of this governess, of his aunt, and of an old servant maid called Vasilievna, Fedia passed four whole years.  Sometimes he would sit in a corner with his “Emblems”—­there he would sit and sit.  A scent of geraniums filled the low room, one tallow candle burnt dimly, the cricket chirped monotonously as if it were bored, the little clock ticked busily on the wall, a mouse scratched stealthily and gnawed behind the tapestry; and the three old maids, like the three Fates, knitted away silently and swiftly, the shadows of their hands now scampering along, now mysteriously quivering in the dusk; and strange, no less dusky, thoughts were being born in the child’s mind.

No one would have called Fedia an interesting child.  He was rather pale, but stout, badly built, and awkward—­a regular moujik, to use the expression employed by Glafira Petrovna.  The pallor would soon have vanished from his face if they had let him go out more into the fresh air.  He learnt his lessons pretty well, though he was often idle.  He never cried, but he sometimes evinced a savage obstinacy.  At those times no one could do any thing with him.  Fedia did not love a single one of the persons by whom he was surrounded.  Alas for that heart which has not loved in youth!