When going away I asked Doctor Chwastowski about his brothers.  He said that one of them had a brewery at Ploszow, which I knew already from my aunt’s letter; a second had a bookshop at Warsaw; and a third, who had been at a mercantile school, had gone as assistant with Pan Kromitzki to the East.

“It is the brewer who has the best of it just now,” he said; “but we all work, and in time shall win good positions.  It was lucky our father lost his fortune; otherwise every one of us would sit on his bit of land ‘glebae adscripti,’ and in the end lose it as my father did.”

In spite of the preoccupation of my mind I listened with a certain interest.  “There are, then,” I said to myself, “people that are neither over-civilized nor steeped in ignorance.  There are those that can do something and thus form the intermediate, healthy link between decay and barbarism.”  It is possible that this social strata mostly exists in bigger towns, where it is continually recruited by the influx of the sons of bankrupt noblemen, who adapt themselves to burgher traditions of work, and bring to it strong nerves and muscles.  I then recalled what Sniatynski once said when I left him:  “From such as you nothing good can come; your fathers must first lose all they have, else even your grandsons will not work.”  And here are Chwastowski’s sons who take to it, and push on in the world by help of their own strong shoulders.  I, too, perhaps, had I no fortune, should have to do something, and should acquire that energy of decision in which I have been wanting all my life.

The doctor left me presently as he had another patient at Ploszow, a young cleric from the Warsaw seminary, the son of one of the Ploszow peasants.  He is in the last stage of consumption.  My aunt has given him a room in one of the out-buildings, where she and Aniela look after him.  When I heard of this I went to pay him a visit, and instead of the dying man I expected to see, I found a young, rather thin-looking lad, but bright and full of life.  The doctor says it is the last flicker of the lamp.  The young cleric was nursed by his mother, who, upon seeing me, overwhelmed me with a shower of gratitude copious enough to drown myself in.

Aniela did not visit the sick man that day, but remained with her mother.  I saw her only at dinner, at which also the mother was present in her invalid’s chair.  It is only natural that Aniela should devote her time to her mother, and yet I fancy she does it partly to avoid being alone with me.  In time our mutual relations will establish themselves upon an easier footing, but I quite understand that at first it will be a little awkward.  Aniela has so much intelligence of heart, so much goodness and sensibility, that she cannot look upon our present position with indifference, and has not worldly experience enough to preserve an appearance of ease.  This practice comes with later years, when the live spring of feelings begins to dry up and the mind acquires a certain conventionality.