To continue this conversation was unprofitable.  My father worshipped himself, and nothing was convincing to him but what he said himself.  Besides, I knew perfectly well that the disdain with which he talked of physical toil was founded not so much on reverence for the sacred fire as on a secret dread that I should become a workman, and should set the whole town talking about me; what was worse, all my contemporaries had long ago taken their degrees and were getting on well, and the son of the manager of the State Bank was already a collegiate assessor, while I, his only son, was nothing!  To continue the conversation was unprofitable and unpleasant, but I still sat on and feebly retorted, hoping that I might at last be understood.  The whole question, of course, was clear and simple, and only concerned with the means of my earning my living; but the simplicity of it was not seen, and I was talked to in mawkishly rounded phrases of Borodino, of the sacred fire, of my uncle a forgotten poet, who had once written poor and artificial verses; I was rudely called an addlepate and a dense fellow.  And how I longed to be understood!  In spite of everything, I loved my father and my sister and it had been my habit from childhood to consult them—­ a habit so deeply rooted that I doubt whether I could ever have got rid of it; whether I were in the right or the wrong, I was in constant dread of wounding them, constantly afraid that my father’s thin neck would turn crimson and that he would have a stroke.

“To sit in a stuffy room,” I began, “to copy, to compete with a typewriter, is shameful and humiliating for a man of my age.  What can the sacred fire have to do with it?”

“It’s intellectual work, anyway,” said my father.  “But that’s enough; let us cut short this conversation, and in any case I warn you:  if you don’t go back to your work again, but follow your contemptible propensities, then my daughter and I will banish you from our hearts.  I shall strike you out of my will, I swear by the living God!”

With perfect sincerity to prove the purity of the motives by which I wanted to be guided in all my doings, I said: 

“The question of inheritance does not seem very important to me.  I shall renounce it all beforehand.”

For some reason or other, quite to my surprise, these words were deeply resented by my father.  He turned crimson.

“Don’t dare to talk to me like that, stupid!” he shouted in a thin, shrill voice.  “Wastrel!” and with a rapid, skilful, and habitual movement he slapped me twice in the face.  “You are forgetting yourself.”

When my father beat me as a child I had to stand up straight, with my hands held stiffly to my trouser seams, and look him straight in the face.  And now when he hit me I was utterly overwhelmed, and, as though I were still a child, drew myself up and tried to look him in the face.  My father was old and very thin but his delicate muscles must have been as strong as leather, for his blows hurt a good deal.