found
his sister crying. She was sitting on the sofa with her head bowed,
wringing her hands, and tears were flowing freely down her cheeks.
The critic's good heart throbbed with pain. Tears fell from his
eyes, too, and he longed to pet his sister, to forgive her, to beg
her forgiveness, and to live as they used to before. . . . He knelt
down and kissed her head, her hands, her shoulders. . . . She smiled,
smiled bitterly, unaccountably, while he with a cry of joy jumped
up, seized the magazine from the table and said warmly:

"Hurrah! We'll live as we used to, Verotchka! With God's blessing!
And I've such a surprise for you here! Instead of celebrating the
occasion with champagne, let us read it together! A splendid,
wonderful thing!"

"Oh, no, no!" cried Vera Semyonovna, pushing away the book in alarm.
"I've read it already! I don't want it, I don't want it!"

"When did you read it?"

"A year . . . two years ago. . . I read it long ago, and I know it,
I know it!"

"H'm! . . . You're a fanatic!" her brother said coldly, flinging
the magazine on to the table.

"No, you are a fanatic, not I! You!" And Vera Semyonovna dissolved
into tears again. Her brother stood before her, looked at her
quivering shoulders, and thought. He thought, not of the agonies
of loneliness endured by any one who begins to think in a new way
of their own, not of the inevitable sufferings of a genuine spiritual
revolution, but of the outrage of his programme, the outrage to his
author's vanity.

From this time he treated his sister coldly, with careless irony,
and he endured her presence in the room as one endures the presence
of old women that are dependent on one. For her part, she left off
disputing with him and met all his arguments, jeers, and attacks
with a condescending silence which irritated him more than ever.

One summer morning Vera Semyonovna, dressed for travelling with a
satchel over her shoulder, went in to her brother and coldly kissed
him on the forehead.

"Where are you going?" he asked with surprise.

"To the province of N. to do vaccination work." Her brother went
out into the street with her.

"So that's what you've decided upon, you queer girl," he muttered.
"Don't you want some money?"

"No, thank you. Good-bye."

The sister shook her brother's hand and set off.

"Why don't you have a cab?" cried Vladimir Semyonitch.

She did not answer. Her brother gazed after her, watched her
rusty-looking waterproof