“You won’t resist evil, but you resist my having servants!” he taunted her.  “If servants are an evil, why do you oppose it?  That’s inconsistent!”

He suffered, was indignant and even ashamed.  He felt ashamed when his sister began doing odd things before strangers.

“It’s awful, my dear fellow,” he said to me in private, waving his hands in despair.  “It seems that our ingenue has remained to play a part in the farce, too.  She’s become morbid to the marrow of her bones!  I’ve washed my hands of her, let her think as she likes; but why does she talk, why does she excite me?  She ought to think what it means for me to listen to her.  What I feel when in my presence she has the effrontery to support her errors by blasphemously quoting the teaching of Christ!  It chokes me!  It makes me hot all over to hear my sister propounding her doctrines and trying to distort the Gospel to suit her, when she purposely refrains from mentioning how the moneychangers were driven out of the Temple.  That’s, my dear fellow, what comes of being half educated, undeveloped!  That’s what comes of medical studies which provide no general culture!”

One day on coming home from the office, Vladimir Semyonitch found his sister crying.  She was sitting on the sofa with her head bowed, wringing her hands, and tears were flowing freely down her cheeks.  The critic’s good heart throbbed with pain.  Tears fell from his eyes, too, and he longed to pet his sister, to forgive her, to beg her forgiveness, and to live as they used to before. . . .  He knelt down and kissed her head, her hands, her shoulders. . . .  She smiled, smiled bitterly, unaccountably, while he with a cry of joy jumped up, seized the magazine from the table and said warmly: 

“Hurrah!  We’ll live as we used to, Verotchka!  With God’s blessing!  And I’ve such a surprise for you here!  Instead of celebrating the occasion with champagne, let us read it together!  A splendid, wonderful thing!”

“Oh, no, no!” cried Vera Semyonovna, pushing away the book in alarm.  “I’ve read it already!  I don’t want it, I don’t want it!”

“When did you read it?”

“A year . . . two years ago. . .  I read it long ago, and I know it, I know it!”

“H’m! . . .  You’re a fanatic!” her brother said coldly, flinging the magazine on to the table.

“No, you are a fanatic, not I!  You!” And Vera Semyonovna dissolved into tears again.  Her brother stood before her, looked at her quivering shoulders, and thought.  He thought, not of the agonies of loneliness endured by any one who begins to think in a new way of their own, not of the inevitable sufferings of a genuine spiritual revolution, but of the outrage of his programme, the outrage to his author’s vanity.

From this time he treated his sister coldly, with careless irony, and he endured her presence in the room as one endures the presence of old women that are dependent on one.  For her part, she left off disputing with him and met all his arguments, jeers, and attacks with a condescending silence which irritated him more than ever.