Seryozha listened attentively, and looked into his father’s eyes without blinking.  The prosecutor went on, thinking:  “What next?” He spun out a long rigmarole, and ended like this: 

“The emperor’s son fell ill with consumption through smoking, and died when he was twenty.  His infirm and sick old father was left without anyone to help him.  There was no one to govern the kingdom and defend the palace.  Enemies came, killed the old man, and destroyed the palace, and now there are neither cherries, nor birds, nor little bells in the garden. . . .  That’s what happened.”

This ending struck Yevgeny Petrovitch as absurd and naive, but the whole story made an intense impression on Seryozha.  Again his eyes were clouded by mournfulness and something like fear; for a minute he looked pensively at the dark window, shuddered, and said, in a sinking voice: 

“I am not going to smoke any more. . . .”

When he had said good-night and gone away his father walked up and down the room and smiled to himself.

“They would tell me it was the influence of beauty, artistic form,” he meditated.  “It may be so, but that’s no comfort.  It’s not the right way, all the same. . . .  Why must morality and truth never be offered in their crude form, but only with embellishments, sweetened and gilded like pills?  It’s not normal. . . .  It’s falsification . . . deception . . . tricks . . . .”

He thought of the jurymen to whom it was absolutely necessary to make a “speech,” of the general public who absorb history only from legends and historical novels, and of himself and how he had gathered an understanding of life not from sermons and laws, but from fables, novels, poems.

“Medicine should be sweet, truth beautiful, and man has had this foolish habit since the days of Adam . . . though, indeed, perhaps it is all natural, and ought to be so. . . .  There are many deceptions and delusions in nature that serve a purpose.”

He set to work, but lazy, intimate thoughts still strayed through his mind for a good while.  Overhead the scales could no longer be heard, but the inhabitant of the second storey was still pacing from one end of the room to another.

A CLASSICAL STUDENT

Before setting off for his examination in Greek, Vanya kissed all the holy images.  His stomach felt as though it were upside down; there was a chill at his heart, while the heart itself throbbed and stood still with terror before the unknown.  What would he get that day?  A three or a two?  Six times he went to his mother for her blessing, and, as he went out, asked his aunt to pray for him.  On the way to school he gave a beggar two kopecks, in the hope that those two kopecks would atone for his ignorance, and that, please God, he would not get the numerals with those awful forties and eighties.

He came back from the high school late, between four and five.  He came in, and noiselessly lay down on his bed.  His thin face was pale.  There were dark rings round his red eyes.