“See there! we have discovered a new saint,” said he, trembling with rage and his teeth chattering as if he had a chill. (I happened to be in the room, a witness of this painful scene.) “Very well, from this day forth all is over between us.  The heavens are above us, and there is the door.  I have nothing more to do with you, nor you with me.  You are too honest for me, sir:  how could we get along together?  But you sha’n’t have a bit of ground to stand on, nor a roof over your head.”

In vain did Latkin beg for mercy and fling himself on the ground before him:  in vain did he try to explain what had filled his own soul with painful astonishment.  “Just consider, Porphyr Petrovitch,” he stammered forth.  “I did it without any hope of gain:  I cut my own throat.”

My father was immovable, and Latkin never more set foot in the house.  It seemed as if fate had determined to fulfill my father’s last evil wishes.  Soon after the breach between them, which took place about two years before my story began, Latkin’s wife died:  it is true, however, that she had for a long time been ill.  His second daughter, a child of three years, became deaf and dumb one day from fright:  a swarm of bees lit on her head.  Latkin himself had a stroke of paralysis and fell into the most extreme misery.  How he managed to scrape along at all, what he lived on, it was hard to imagine.  He dwelt in a tumbledown hovel but a short distance from our house.  His eldest daughter, Raissa, lived with him and managed for him as well as she could.  This very Raissa is the new person whom I must introduce into my story.

XII.

So long as her father was on friendly terms with mine we used to see her continually:  she would sometimes spend whole days at our house, sewing or knitting with her swift, delicate fingers.  She was a tall, somewhat slender girl, with thoughtful gray eyes in a pale oval face.  She spoke little, but what she said was sensible, and she uttered it in a low, clear voice, without opening her mouth much and without showing her teeth:  when she laughed—­which was seldom—­she showed them all suddenly, large and white as almonds.  I also remember her walk, which was light and elastic, with a little spring in every step:  it seemed to me always as if she were going up stairs, even when she was on level ground.  She held herself erect, with her hands folded, and whatever she did, whatever she undertook—­if she only threaded a needle or smoothed her dress—­was well and gracefully done.  You will hardly believe it, but there was something touching in her way of doing things.  Her baptismal name was Raissa, but we called her “Little Black-Lip,” for she had a little mole, like a berry-stain, on her upper lip, but this did not disfigure her; indeed, it had the contrary effect.  She was just a year older than David.  I had for her a feeling akin to reverence, but she had very little to do with me.