Ivan Matveyitch sits down and smiles broadly.  Almost every evening he sits in this study and always feels something extraordinarily soft, attracting him, as it were akin, in the voice and the glance of the man of learning.  There are moments when he even fancies that the man of learning is becoming attached to him, used to him, and that if he scolds him for being late, it’s simply because he misses his chatter about tarantulas and how they catch goldfinches on the Don.

ZINOTCHKA

THE party of sportsmen spent the night in a peasant’s hut on some newly mown hay.  The moon peeped in at the window; from the street came the mournful wheezing of a concertina; from the hay came a sickly sweet, faintly troubling scent.  The sportsmen talked about dogs, about women, about first love, and about snipe.  After all the ladies of their acquaintance had been picked to pieces, and hundreds of stories had been told, the stoutest of the sportsmen, who looked in the darkness like a haycock, and who talked in the mellow bass of a staff officer, gave a loud yawn and said: 

“It is nothing much to be loved; the ladies are created for the purpose of loving us men.  But, tell me, has any one of you fellows been hated—­passionately, furiously hated?  Has any one of you watched the ecstasies of hatred?  Eh?”

No answer followed.

“Has no one, gentlemen?” asked the staff officer’s bass voice.  “But I, now, have been hated, hated by a pretty girl, and have been able to study the symptoms of first hatred directed against myself.  It was the first, because it was something exactly the converse of first love.  What I am going to tell, however, happened when I knew nothing about love or hate.  I was eight at the time, but that made no difference; in this case it was not he but she that mattered.  Well, I beg your attention.  One fine summer evening, just before sunset, I was sitting in the nursery, doing my lesson with my governess, Zinotchka, a very charming and poetical creature who had left boarding school not long before.  Zinotchka looked absent-mindedly towards the window and said: 

“’Yes.  We breathe in oxygen; now tell me, Petya, what do we breathe out?’

“‘Carbonic acid gas,’ I answered, looking towards the same window.

“‘Right,’ assented Zinotchka.  ’Plants, on the contrary, breathe in carbonic acid gas, and breathe out oxygen.  Carbonic acid gas is contained in seltzer water, and in the fumes from the samovar. . . .  It is a very noxious gas.  Near Naples there is the so-called Cave of Dogs, which contains carbonic acid gas; a dog dropped into it is suffocated and dies.’

“This luckless Cave of Dogs near Naples is a chemical marvel beyond which no governess ventures to go.  Zinotchka always hotly maintained the usefulness of natural science, but I doubt if she knew any chemistry beyond this Cave.