I notice that her face has lost the old look of confiding trustfulness.  Her expression now is cold, apathetic, and absent-minded, like that of passengers who had to wait too long for a train.  She is dressed, as in old days, simply and beautifully, but carelessly; her dress and her hair show visible traces of the sofas and rocking-chairs in which she spends whole days at a stretch.  And she has lost the curiosity she had in old days.  She has ceased to ask me questions now, as though she had experienced everything in life and looked for nothing new from it.

Towards four o’clock there begins to be sounds of movement in the hall and in the drawing-room.  Liza has come back from the Conservatoire, and has brought some girl-friends in with her.  We hear them playing on the piano, trying their voices and laughing; in the dining-room Yegor is laying the table, with the clatter of crockery.

“Good-bye,” said Katya.  “I won’t go in and see your people today.  They must excuse me.  I haven’t time.  Come and see me.”

While I am seeing her to the door, she looks me up and down grimly, and says with vexation: 

“You are getting thinner and thinner!  Why don’t you consult a doctor?  I’ll call at Sergey Fyodorovitch’s and ask him to have a look at you.”

“There’s no need, Katya.”

“I can’t think where your people’s eyes are!  They are a nice lot, I must say!”

She puts on her fur coat abruptly, and as she does so two or three hairpins drop unnoticed on the floor from her carelessly arranged hair.  She is too lazy and in too great a hurry to do her hair up; she carelessly stuffs the falling curls under her hat, and goes away.

When I go into the dining-room my wife asks me: 

“Was Katya with you just now?  Why didn’t she come in to see us?  It’s really strange....”

“Mamma,” Liza says to her reproachfully, “let her alone, if she doesn’t want to.  We are not going down on our knees to her.”

“It’s very neglectful, anyway.  To sit for three hours in the study without remembering our existence!  But of course she must do as she likes.”

Varya and Liza both hate Katya.  This hatred is beyond my comprehension, and probably one would have to be a woman in order to understand it.  I am ready to stake my life that of the hundred and fifty young men I see every day in the lecture-theatre, and of the hundred elderly ones I meet every week, hardly one could be found capable of understanding their hatred and aversion for Katya’s past—­that is, for her having been a mother without being a wife, and for her having had an illegitimate child; and at the same time I cannot recall one woman or girl of my acquaintance who would not consciously or unconsciously harbour such feelings.  And this is not because woman is purer or more virtuous than man:  why, virtue and purity are not very different from vice if they are not free from evil feeling.  I attribute