When the maid came in to announce that dinner was ready, Fedor Mihailovich rose.

“At last!” he said.  “I don’t feel hungry any longer.”

He went to the dining-room with a sullen face.  At table his wife made some remark, but he gave her such a short and angry answer that she abstained from further speech.  The son also did not lift his eyes from his plate, and was silent all the time.  The trio finished their dinner in silence, rose from the table and separated, without a word.

After dinner the boy went to his room, took the coupon and the change out of his pocket, and threw the money on the table.  After that he took off his uniform and put on a jacket.

He sat down to work, and began to study Latin grammar out of a dog’s-eared book.  After a while he rose, closed and bolted the door, shifted the money into a drawer, took out some cigarette papers, rolled one up, stuffed it with cotton wool, and began to smoke.

He spent nearly two hours over his grammar and writing books without understanding a word of what he saw before him; then he rose and began to stamp up and down the room, trying to recollect all that his father had said to him.  All the abuse showered upon him, and worst of all his father’s angry face, were as fresh in his memory as if he saw and heard them all over again.  “Silly boy!  You ought to get a good thrashing!” And the more he thought of it the angrier he grew.  He remembered also how his father said:  “I see what a scoundrel you will turn out.  I know you will.  You are sure to become a cheat, if you go on like that.”  He had certainly forgotten how he felt when he was young!  “What crime have I committed, I wonder?  I wanted to go to the theatre, and having no money borrowed some from Petia Grouchetsky.  Was that so very wicked of me?  Another father would have been sorry for me; would have asked how it all happened; whereas he just called me names.  He never thinks of anything but himself.  When it is he who has not got something he wants—­that is a different matter!  Then all the house is upset by his shouts.  And I—­I am a scoundrel, a cheat, he says.  No, I don’t love him, although he is my father.  It may be wrong, but I hate him.”

There was a knock at the door.  The servant brought a letter—­a message from his friend.  “They want an answer,” said the servant.

The letter ran as follows:  “I ask you now for the third time to pay me back the six roubles you have borrowed; you are trying to avoid me.  That is not the way an honest man ought to behave.  Will you please send the amount by my messenger?  I am myself in a frightful fix.  Can you not get the money somewhere?—­Yours, according to whether you send the money or not, with scorn, or love, Grouchetsky.”

“There we have it!  Such a pig!  Could he not wait a while?  I will have another try.”