“Does he know what is meant by word of honour?” Bykovsky asked himself.  “No, I am a poor teacher of morality!  If some schoolmaster or one of our legal fellows could peep into my brain at this moment he would call me a poor stick, and would very likely suspect me of unnecessary subtlety. . . .  But in school and in court, of course, all these wretched questions are far more simply settled than at home; here one has to do with people whom one loves beyond everything, and love is exacting and complicates the question.  If this boy were not my son, but my pupil, or a prisoner on his trial, I should not be so cowardly, and my thoughts would not be racing all over the place!”

Yevgeny Petrovitch sat down to the table and pulled one of Seryozha’s drawings to him.  In it there was a house with a crooked roof, and smoke which came out of the chimney like a flash of lightning in zigzags up to the very edge of the paper; beside the house stood a soldier with dots for eyes and a bayonet that looked like the figure 4.

“A man can’t be taller than a house,” said the prosecutor.

Seryozha got on his knee, and moved about for some time to get comfortably settled there.

“No, papa!” he said, looking at his drawing.  “If you were to draw the soldier small you would not see his eyes.”

Ought he to argue with him?  From daily observation of his son the prosecutor had become convinced that children, like savages, have their own artistic standpoints and requirements peculiar to them, beyond the grasp of grown-up people.  Had he been attentively observed, Seryozha might have struck a grown-up person as abnormal.  He thought it possible and reasonable to draw men taller than houses, and to represent in pencil, not only objects, but even his sensations.  Thus he would depict the sounds of an orchestra in the form of smoke like spherical blurs, a whistle in the form of a spiral thread. . . .  To his mind sound was closely connected with form and colour, so that when he painted letters he invariably painted the letter L yellow, M red, A black, and so on.

Abandoning his drawing, Seryozha shifted about once more, got into a comfortable attitude, and busied himself with his father’s beard.  First he carefully smoothed it, then he parted it and began combing it into the shape of whiskers.

“Now you are like Ivan Stepanovitch,” he said, “and in a minute you will be like our porter.  Papa, why is it porters stand by doors?  Is it to prevent thieves getting in?”

The prosecutor felt the child’s breathing on his face, he was continually touching his hair with his cheek, and there was a warm soft feeling in his soul, as soft as though not only his hands but his whole soul were lying on the velvet of Seryozha’s jacket.

He looked at the boy’s big dark eyes, and it seemed to him as though from those wide pupils there looked out at him his mother and his wife and everything that he had ever loved.