“Yes, Volodya; all these days I’ve been thinking, I’ve been thinking painfully for a long time, and I have come to the conclusion that you are hopelessly reactionary and conventional.  Come, ask yourself what is the object of your zealous, conscientious work?  Tell me, what is it?  Why, everything has long ago been extracted that can be extracted from that rubbish in which you are always rummaging.  You may pound water in a mortar and analyse it as long as you like, you’ll make nothing more of it than the chemists have made already. . . .”

“Indeed!” drawled Vladimir Semyonitch, getting up.  “Yes, all this is old rubbish because these ideas are eternal; but what do you consider new, then?”

“You undertake to work in the domain of thought; it is for you to think of something new.  It’s not for me to teach you.”

“Me—­an alchemist!” the critic cried in wonder and indignation, screwing up his eyes ironically.  “Art, progress—­all that is alchemy?”

“You see, Volodya, it seems to me that if all you thinking people had set yourselves to solving great problems, all these little questions that you fuss about now would solve themselves by the way.  If you go up in a balloon to see a town, you will incidentally, without any effort, see the fields and the villages and the rivers as well.  When stearine is manufactured, you get glycerine as a by-product.  It seems to me that contemporary thought has settled on one spot and stuck to it.  It is prejudiced, apathetic, timid, afraid to take a wide titanic flight, just as you and I are afraid to climb on a high mountain; it is conservative.”

Such conversations could not but leave traces.  The relations of the brother and sister grew more and more strained every day.  The brother became unable to work in his sister’s presence, and grew irritable when he knew his sister was lying on the sofa, looking at his back; while the sister frowned nervously and stretched when, trying to bring back the past, he attempted to share his enthusiasms with her.  Every evening she complained of being bored, and talked about independence of mind and those who are in the rut of tradition.  Carried away by her new ideas, Vera Semyonovna proved that the work that her brother was so engrossed in was conventional, that it was a vain effort of conservative minds to preserve what had already served its turn and was vanishing from the scene of action.  She made no end of comparisons.  She compared her brother at one time to an alchemist, then to a musty old Believer who would sooner die than listen to reason.  By degrees there was a perceptible change in her manner of life, too.  She was capable of lying on the sofa all day long doing nothing but think, while her face wore a cold, dry expression such as one sees in one-sided people of strong faith.  She began to refuse the attentions of the servants, swept and tidied her own room, cleaned her own boots and brushed her own clothes.  Her brother could not help looking with irritation and even hatred at her cold face when she went about her menial work.  In that work, which was always performed with a certain solemnity, he saw something strained and false, he saw something both pharisaical and affected.  And knowing he could not touch her by persuasion, he carped at her and teased her like a schoolboy.