ed to your forefathers whose traditions we ought to preserve as
sacred. Did you obey me? You scorned my counsels, and obstinately
persisted in clinging to your false ideals; worse still you drew
your sister into the path of error with you, and led her to lose
her moral principles and sense of shame. Now you are both in a bad
way. Well, as thou sowest, so shalt thou reap!"

As he said this he walked up and down the room. He probably imagined
that I had come to him to confess my wrong doings, and he probably
expected that I should begin begging him to forgive my sister and
me. I was cold, I was shivering as though I were in a fever, and
spoke with difficulty in a husky voice.

"And I beg you, too, to remember," I said, "on this very spot I
besought you to understand me, to reflect, to decide with me how
and for what we should live, and in answer you began talking about
our forefathers, about my grandfather who wrote poems. One tells
you now that your only daughter is hopelessly ill, and you go on
again about your forefathers, your traditions. . . . And such
frivolity in your old age, when death is close at hand, and you
haven't more than five or ten years left!"

"What have you come here for?" my father asked sternly, evidently
offended at my reproaching him for his frivolity.

"I don't know. I love you, I am unutterably sorry that we are so
far apart--so you see I have come. I love you still, but my sister
has broken with you completely. She does not forgive you, and will
never forgive you now. Your very name arouses her aversion for the
past, for life."

"And who is to blame for it?" cried my father. "It's your fault,
you scoundrel!"

"Well, suppose it is my fault?" I said. "I admit I have been to
blame in many things, but why is it that this life of yours, which
you think binding upon us, too--why is it so dreary, so barren?
How is it that in not one of these houses you have been building
for the last thirty years has there been anyone from whom I might
have learnt how to live, so as not to be to blame? There is not one
honest man in the whole town! These houses of yours are nests of
damnation, where mothers and daughters are made away with, where
children are tortured. . . . My poor mother!" I went on in despair.
"My poor sister! One has to stupefy oneself with vodka, with cards,
with scandal; one must become a scoundrel, a hypocrite, or go on
drawing plans for years and years, so as not to notice all the
hor