Som was a tall black dog with long legs and a tail as hard as a stick.  At dinner and tea he usually moved about under the table, and thumped on people’s boots and on the legs of the table with his tail.  He was a good-natured, stupid dog, but Nikitin could not endure him because he had the habit of putting his head on people’s knees at dinner and messing their trousers with saliva.  Nikitin had more than once tried to hit him on his head with a knife-handle, to flip him on the nose, had abused him, had complained of him, but nothing saved his trousers.

After their ride the tea, jam, rusks, and butter seemed very nice.  They all drank their first glass in silence and with great relish; over the second they began an argument.  It was always Varya who started the arguments at tea; she was good-looking, handsomer than Masha, and was considered the cleverest and most cultured person in the house, and she behaved with dignity and severity, as an eldest daughter should who has taken the place of her dead mother in the house.  As the mistress of the house, she felt herself entitled to wear a dressing-gown in the presence of her guests, and to call the officers by their surnames; she looked on Masha as a little girl, and talked to her as though she were a schoolmistress.  She used to speak of herself as an old maid—­so she was certain she would marry.

Every conversation, even about the weather, she invariably turned into an argument.  She had a passion for catching at words, pouncing on contradictions, quibbling over phrases.  You would begin talking to her, and she would stare at you and suddenly interrupt:  “Excuse me, excuse me, Petrov, the other day you said the very opposite!”

Or she would smile ironically and say:  “I notice, though, you begin to advocate the principles of the secret police.  I congratulate you.”

If you jested or made a pun, you would hear her voice at once:  “That’s stale,” “That’s pointless.”  If an officer ventured on a joke, she would make a contemptuous grimace and say, “An army joke!”

And she rolled the r so impressively that Mushka invariably answered from under a chair, “Rrr . . . nga-nga-nga . . . !”

On this occasion at tea the argument began with Nikitin’s mentioning the school examinations.

“Excuse me, Sergey Vassilitch,” Varya interrupted him.  “You say it’s difficult for the boys.  And whose fault is that, let me ask you?  For instance, you set the boys in the eighth class an essay on ‘Pushkin as a Psychologist.’  To begin with, you shouldn’t set such a difficult subject; and, secondly, Pushkin was not a psychologist.  Shtchedrin now, or Dostoevsky let us say, is a different matter, but Pushkin is a great poet and nothing more.”

“Shtchedrin is one thing, and Pushkin is another,” Nikitin answered sulkily.

“I know you don’t think much of Shtchedrin at the high school, but that’s not the point.  Tell me, in what sense is Pushkin a psychologist?”