soon as the plebeian forces himself into a place he is not fit for he begins to ail, to go into consumption, to go out of his mind, and to degenerate, and nowhere do we find so many puny, neurotic wrecks, consumptives, and starvelings of all sorts as among these darlings.  They die like flies in autumn.  If it were not for this providential degeneration there would not have been a stone left standing of our civilization, the rabble would have demolished everything.  Tell me, if you please, what has the inroad of the barbarians given us so far?  What has the rabble brought with it?” Rashevitch assumed a mysterious, frightened expression, and went on:  “Never has literature and learning been at such low ebb among us as now.  The men of to-day, my good sir, have neither ideas nor ideals, and all their sayings and doings are permeated by one spirit—­to get all they can and to strip someone to his last thread.  All these men of to-day who give themselves out as honest and progressive people can be bought at a rouble a piece, and the distinguishing mark of the ‘intellectual’ of to-day is that you have to keep strict watch over your pocket when you talk to him, or else he will run off with your purse.”  Rashevitch winked and burst out laughing.  “Upon my soul, he will! he said, in a thin, gleeful voice.  “And morals!  What of their morals?” Rashevitch looked round towards the door.  “No one is surprised nowadays when a wife robs and leaves her husband.  What’s that, a trifle!  Nowadays, my dear boy, a chit of a girl of twelve is scheming to get a lover, and all these amateur theatricals and literary evenings are only invented to make it easier to get a rich merchant to take a girl on as his mistress. . . .  Mothers sell their daughters, and people make no bones about asking a husband at what price he sells his wife, and one can haggle over the bargain, you know, my dear. . . .”

Meier, who had been sitting motionless and silent all the time, suddenly got up from the sofa and looked at his watch.

“I beg your pardon, Pavel Ilyitch,” he said, “it is time for me to be going.”

But Pavel Ilyitch, who had not finished his remarks, put his arm round him and, forcibly reseating him on the sofa, vowed that he would not let him go without supper.  And again Meier sat and listened, but he looked at Rashevitch with perplexity and uneasiness, as though he were only now beginning to understand him.  Patches of red came into his face.  And when at last a maidservant came in to tell them that the young ladies asked them to go to supper, he gave a sigh of relief and was the first to walk out of the study.

At the table in the next room were Rashevitch’s daughters, Genya and Iraida, girls of four-and-twenty and two-and-twenty respectively, both very pale, with black eyes, and exactly the same height.  Genya had her hair down, and Iraida had hers done up high on her head.  Before eating anything they each drank a wineglassful of bitter liqueur, with an air as though they had drunk it by accident for the first time in their lives and both were overcome with confusion and burst out laughing.