“I don’t know, dear.  When I can’t sleep I shut my eyes very tightly, like this, and picture to myself Anna Karenin moving about and talking, or something historical from the ancient world. . . .”

Nadya felt that her mother did not understand her and was incapable of understanding.  She felt this for the first time in her life, and it positively frightened her and made her want to hide herself; and she went away to her own room.

At two o’clock they sat down to dinner.  It was Wednesday, a fast day, and so vegetable soup and bream with boiled grain were set before Granny.

To tease Granny Sasha ate his meat soup as well as the vegetable soup.  He was making jokes all through dinner-time, but his jests were laboured and invariably with a moral bearing, and the effect was not at all amusing when before making some witty remark he raised his very long, thin, deathly-looking fingers; and when one remembered that he was very ill and would probably not be much longer in this world, one felt sorry for him and ready to weep.

After dinner Granny went off to her own room to lie down.  Nina Ivanovna played on the piano for a little, and then she too went away.

“Oh, dear Nadya!” Sasha began his usual afternoon conversation, “if only you would listen to me!  If only you would!”

She was sitting far back in an old-fashioned armchair, with her eyes shut, while he paced slowly about the room from corner to corner.

“If only you would go to the university,” he said.  “Only enlightened and holy people are interesting, it’s only they who are wanted.  The more of such people there are, the sooner the Kingdom of God will come on earth.  Of your town then not one stone will be left, everything will he blown up from the foundations, everything will be changed as though by magic.  And then there will be immense, magnificent houses here, wonderful gardens, marvellous fountains, remarkable people. . . .  But that’s not what matters most.  What matters most is that the crowd, in our sense of the word, in the sense in which it exists now—­that evil will not exist then, because every man will believe and every man will know what he is living for and no one will seek moral support in the crowd.  Dear Nadya, darling girl, go away!  Show them all that you are sick of this stagnant, grey, sinful life.  Prove it to yourself at least!”

“I can’t, Sasha, I’m going to be married.”

“Oh nonsense!  What’s it for!”

They went out into the garden and walked up and down a little.

“And however that may be, my dear girl, you must think, you must realize how unclean, how immoral this idle life of yours is,” Sasha went on.  “Do understand that if, for instance, you and your mother and your grandmother do nothing, it means that someone else is working for you, you are eating up someone else’s life, and is that clean, isn’t it filthy?”

Nadya wanted to say “Yes, that is true”; she wanted to say that she understood, but tears came into her eyes, her spirits drooped, and shrinking into herself she went off to her room.