They must have been very good people, otherwise they could not have been his father and mother; at any rate, they were charming and unlike other people.  He could say with certainty that his father was very great, terribly wise, that he possessed immense power, which made him a person to be feared somewhat, and it was interesting to talk with him about unusual things, placing his hand in father’s large, strong, warm hand for safety’s sake.

Mamma was not so large, and sometimes she was even very small; she was very kind hearted, she kissed tenderly; she understood very well how he felt when he had a pain in his little stomach, and only with her could he relieve his heart when he grew tired of life, of his games or when he was the victim of some cruel injustice.  And if it was unpleasant to cry in father’s presence, and even dangerous to be capricious, his tears had an unusually pleasant taste in mother’s presence and filled his soul with a peculiar serene sadness, which he could find neither in his games nor in laughter, nor even in the reading of the most terrible fairy tales.

It should be added that mamma was a beautiful woman and that everybody was in love with her.  That was good, for he felt proud of it, but that was also bad—­for he feared that she might be taken away.  And every time one of the men, one of those enormous, invariably inimical men who were busy with themselves, looked at mamma fixedly for a long time, Yura felt bored and uneasy.  He felt like stationing himself between him and mamma, and no matter where he went to attend to his own affairs, something was drawing him back.

Sometimes mamma would utter a bad, terrifying phrase: 

“Why are you forever staying around here?  Go and play in your own room.”

There was nothing left for him to do but to go away.  He would take a book along or he would sit down to draw, but that did not always help him.  Sometimes mamma would praise him for reading but sometimes she would say again: 

“You had better go to your own room, Yurochka.  You see, you’ve spilt water on the tablecloth again; you always do some mischief with your drawing.”

And then she would reproach him for being perverse.  But he felt worst of all when a dangerous and suspicious guest would come when Yura had to go to bed.  But when he lay down in his bed a sense of easiness came over him and he felt as though all was ended; the lights went out, life stopped; everything slept.

In all such cases with suspicious men Yura felt vaguely but very strongly that he was replacing father in some way.  And that made him somewhat like a grown man—­he was in a bad frame of mind, like a grown person, but, therefore, he was unusually calculating, wise and serious.  Of course, he said nothing about this to any one, for no one would understand him; but, by the manner in which he caressed father when he arrived and sat down on his knees patronisingly,