“Take them!” he muttered, shaking all over.  “You’ve eaten and drunk your fill, so here’s money for you too!  I need nothing!  Order yourself new boots and uniforms!”

The student turned pale and got up.

“Listen, papa,” he began, gasping for breath.  “I...  I beg you to end this, for...”

“Hold your tongue!” the father shouted at him, and so loudly that the spectacles fell off his nose; “hold your tongue!”

“I used...  I used to be able to put up with such scenes, but... but now I have got out of the way of it.  Do you understand?  I have got out of the way of it!”

“Hold your tongue!” cried the father, and he stamped with his feet.  “You must listen to what I say!  I shall say what I like, and you hold your tongue.  At your age I was earning my living, while you...  Do you know what you cost me, you scoundrel?  I’ll turn you out!  Wastrel!”

“Yevgraf Ivanovitch,” muttered Fedosya Semyonovna, moving her fingers nervously; “you know he... you know Petya...!”

“Hold your tongue!” Shiryaev shouted out to her, and tears actually came into his eyes from anger.  “It is you who have spoilt them—­you!  It’s all your fault!  He has no respect for us, does not say his prayers, and earns nothing!  I am only one against the ten of you!  I’ll turn you out of the house!”

The daughter Varvara gazed fixedly at her mother with her mouth open, moved her vacant-looking eyes to the window, turned pale, and, uttering a loud shriek, fell back in her chair.  The father, with a curse and a wave of the hand, ran out into the yard.

This was how domestic scenes usually ended at the Shiryaevs’.  But on this occasion, unfortunately, Pyotr the student was carried away by overmastering anger.  He was just as hasty and ill-tempered as his father and his grandfather the priest, who used to beat his parishioners about the head with a stick.  Pale and clenching his fists, he went up to his mother and shouted in the very highest tenor note his voice could reach: 

“These reproaches are loathsome! sickening to me!  I want nothing from you!  Nothing!  I would rather die of hunger than eat another mouthful at your expense!  Take your nasty money back! take it!”

The mother huddled against the wall and waved her hands, as though it were not her son, but some phantom before her.  “What have I done?” she wailed.  “What?”

Like his father, the boy waved his hands and ran into the yard.  Shiryaev’s house stood alone on a ravine which ran like a furrow for four miles along the steppe.  Its sides were overgrown with oak saplings and alders, and a stream ran at the bottom.  On one side the house looked towards the ravine, on the other towards the open country, there were no fences nor hurdles.  Instead there were farm-buildings of all sorts close to one another, shutting in a small space in front of the house which was regarded as the yard, and in which hens, ducks, and pigs ran about.