"What do you want with her, you impudent fellow?" she cried as she
pushed Basil (who had risen at her entrance) before her towards the
door. "First you lead a girl on, and then you want to lead her further
still. I suppose it amuses you to see her tears. There's the door, now.
Off you go! We want your room, not your company. And what good can you
see in him?" she went on, turning to Masha. "Has not your uncle been
walking into you to-day already? No; she must stick to her promise,
forsooth! 'I will have no one but Basil,' Fool that you are!"

"Yes, I WILL have no one but him! I'll never love any one else! I could
kill myself for him!" poor Masha burst out, the tears suddenly gushing
forth.

For a while I stood watching her as she wiped away those tears. Then I
fell to contemplating Basil attentively, in the hope of finding out what
there was in him that she found so attractive; yet, though I sympathised
with her sincerely in her grief, I could not for the life of me
understand how such a charming creature as I considered her to be could
love a man like him.

"When I become a man," I thought to myself as I returned to my room,
"Petrovskoe shall be mine, and Basil and Masha my servants. Some day,
when I am sitting in my study and smoking a pipe, Masha will chance to
pass the door on her way to the kitchen with an iron, and I shall say,
'Masha, come here,' and she will enter, and there will be no one else in
the room. Then suddenly Basil too will enter, and, on seeing her, will
cry, 'My sweetheart is lost to me!' and Masha will begin to weep, Then
I shall say, 'Basil, I know that you love her, and that she loves you.
Here are a thousand roubles for you. Marry her, and may God grant you
both happiness!' Then I shall leave them together."

Among the countless thoughts and fancies which pass, without logic or
sequence, through the mind and the imagination, there are always some
which leave behind them a mark so profound that, without remembering
their exact subject, we can at least recall that something good has
passed through our brain, and try to retain and reproduce its effect.
Such was the mark left upon my consciousness by the idea of sacrificing
my feelings to Masha's happiness, seeing that she believed that she
could attain it only through a union with Basil.

XIX. BOYHOOD

PERHAPS people will scarcely believe me when I tell them what were the
dearest, most constant, objects of my reflections during my