se traditions must be kept sacred. Did
you listen to me? You spurned my advice and clung to your wicked
opinions; furthermore, you dragged your sister into your abominable
delusions and brought about her downfall and her shame. Now you are both
suffering for it. As you have sown, so you must reap."

He paced up and down the study as he spoke. Probably he thought that I
had come to him to admit that I was wrong, and probably he was waiting
for me to ask his help for my sister and myself. I was cold, but I shook
as though I were in a fever, and I spoke with difficulty in a hoarse
voice.

"And I must ask you to remember," I said, "that on this very spot I
implored you to try to understand me, to reflect, and to think what we
were living for and to what end, and your answer was to talk about my
ancestors and my grandfather who wrote verses. Now you are told that
your only daughter is in a hopeless condition and you talk of ancestors
and traditions!... And you can maintain such frivolity when death is
near and you have only five or ten years left to live!"

"Why did you come here?" asked my father sternly, evidently affronted at
my reproaching him with frivolity.

"I don't know. I love you. I am more sorry than I can say that we are so
far apart. That is why I came. I still love you, but my sister has
finally broken with you. She does not forgive you and will never forgive
you. Your very name fills her with hatred of her past life."

"And who is to blame?" cried my father. "You, you scoundrel!"

"Yes. Say that I am to blame," I said. "I admit that I am to blame for
many things, but why is your life, which you have tried to force on us,
so tedious and frigid, and ungracious, why are there no people in any of
the houses you have built during the last thirty years from whom I could
learn how to live and how to avoid such suffering? These houses of yours
are infernal dungeons in which mothers and daughters are persecuted,
children are tortured.... My poor mother! My unhappy sister! One needs
to drug oneself with vodka, cards, scandal; cringe, play the hypocrite,
and go on year after year designing rotten houses, not to see the horror
that lurks in them. Our town has been in existence for hundreds of
years, and during the whole of that time it has not given the country
one useful man--not one! You have strangled in embryo everything that
was alive and joyous! A town of shopkeepers, publicans, clerks, and
hypocrites, an aiml