thinking, as strange as to refuse
to recognize the antlers on a stag. One must reckon with facts! You
are a law student and have confined your attention to the humane
studies, and you can still flatter yourself with illusions of
equality, fraternity, and so on; I am an incorrigible Darwinian,
and for me words such as lineage, aristocracy, noble blood, are not
empty sounds."

Rashevitch was roused and spoke with feeling. His eyes sparkled,
his pince-nez would not stay on his nose, he kept nervously shrugging
his shoulders and blinking, and at the word "Darwinian" he looked
jauntily in the looking-glass and combed his grey beard with both
hands. He was wearing a very short and shabby reefer jacket and
narrow trousers; the rapidity of his movements, his jaunty air, and
his abbreviated jacket all seemed out of keeping with him, and his
big comely head, with long hair suggestive of a bishop or a veteran
poet, seemed to have been fixed on to the body of a tall, lanky,
affected youth. When he stood with his legs wide apart, his long
shadow looked like a pair of scissors.

He was fond of talking, and he always fancied that he was saying
something new and original. In the presence of Meier he was conscious
of an unusual flow of spirits and rush of ideas. He found the
examining magistrate sympathetic, and was stimulated by his youth,
his health, his good manners, his dignity, and, above all, by his
cordial attitude to himself and his family. Rashevitch was not a
favourite with his acquaintances; as a rule they fought shy of him,
and, as he knew, declared that he had driven his wife into her grave
with his talking, and they called him, behind his back, a spiteful
creature and a toad. Meier, a man new to the district and unprejudiced,
visited him often and readily and had even been known to say that
Rashevitch and his daughters were the only people in the district
with whom he felt as much at home as with his own people. Rashevitch
liked him too, because he was a young man who might be a good match
for his elder daughter, Genya.

And now, enjoying his ideas and the sound of his own voice, and
looking with pleasure at the plump but well-proportioned, neatly
cropped, correct Meier, Rashevitch dreamed of how he would arrange
his daughter's marriage with a good man, and then how all his worries
over the estate would pass to his son-in-law. Hateful worries! The
interest owing to the bank had not been paid for the last two
quarters,