you in such a hurry, my dear boy? Sit down
and tell me something . . ."

Ivan Matveyitch sits down and smiles broadly. Almost every evening
he sits in this study and always feels something extraordinarily
soft, attracting him, as it were akin, in the voice and the glance
of the man of learning. There are moments when he even fancies that
the man of learning is becoming attached to him, used to him, and
that if he scolds him for being late, it's simply because he misses
his chatter about tarantulas and how they catch goldfinches on the
Don.

ZINOTCHKA

THE party of sportsmen spent the night in a peasant's hut on some
newly mown hay. The moon peeped in at the window; from the street
came the mournful wheezing of a concertina; from the hay came a
sickly sweet, faintly troubling scent. The sportsmen talked about
dogs, about women, about first love, and about snipe. After all the
ladies of their acquaintance had been picked to pieces, and hundreds
of stories had been told, the stoutest of the sportsmen, who looked
in the darkness like a haycock, and who talked in the mellow bass
of a staff officer, gave a loud yawn and said:

"It is nothing much to be loved; the ladies are created for the
purpose of loving us men. But, tell me, has any one of you fellows
been hated--passionately, furiously hated? Has any one of you
watched the ecstasies of hatred? Eh?"

No answer followed.

"Has no one, gentlemen?" asked the staff officer's bass voice. "But
I, now, have been hated, hated by a pretty girl, and have been able
to study the symptoms of first hatred directed against myself. It
was the first, because it was something exactly the converse of
first love. What I am going to tell, however, happened when I knew
nothing about love or hate. I was eight at the time, but that made
no difference; in this case it was not _he_ but _she_ that mattered.
Well, I beg your attention. One fine summer evening, just before
sunset, I was sitting in the nursery, doing my lesson with my
governess, Zinotchka, a very charming and poetical creature who had
left boarding school not long before. Zinotchka looked absent-mindedly
towards the window and said:

"'Yes. We breathe in oxygen; now tell me, Petya, what do we breathe
out?'

"'Carbonic acid gas,' I answered, looking towards the same window.

"'Right,' assented Zinotchka. 'Plants, on the contrary, breathe
in carbonic acid gas, and breathe out oxygen. Carbonic acid gas is
contained in se