don't love you!" he went on breathlessly.
"You've no soul and no morals. . . . Don't dare to wear that raincoat!
Do you hear? Or else I will tear it into rags. . . ."

"Control yourself, my child," _maman_ wept; "the coachman can hear!"

"And where is my father's fortune? Where is your money? You have
wasted it all. I am not ashamed of being poor, but I am ashamed of
having such a mother. . . . When my schoolfellows ask questions
about you, I always blush."

In the train they had to pass two stations before they reached the
town. Volodya spent all the time on the little platform between two
carriages and shivered all over. He did not want to go into the
compartment because there the mother he hated was sitting. He hated
himself, hated the ticket collectors, the smoke from the engine,
the cold to which he attributed his shivering. And the heavier the
weight on his heart, the more strongly he felt that somewhere in
the world, among some people, there was a pure, honourable, warm,
refined life, full of love, affection, gaiety, and serenity. . . .
He felt this and was so intensely miserable that one of the passengers,
after looking in his face attentively, actually asked:

"You have the toothache, I suppose?"

In the town _maman_ and Volodya lived with Marya Petrovna, a lady
of noble rank, who had a large flat and let rooms to boarders.
_Maman_ had two rooms, one with windows and two pictures in gold
frames hanging on the walls, in which her bed stood and in which
she lived, and a little dark room opening out of it in which Volodya
lived. Here there was a sofa on which he slept, and, except that
sofa, there was no other furniture; the rest of the room was entirely
filled up with wicker baskets full of clothes, cardboard hat-boxes,
and all sorts of rubbish, which _maman_ preserved for some reason
or other. Volodya prepared his lessons either in his mother's room
or in the "general room," as the large room in which the boarders
assembled at dinner-time and in the evening was called.

On reaching home he lay down on his sofa and put the quilt over him
to stop his shivering. The cardboard hat-boxes, the wicker baskets,
and the other rubbish, reminded him that he had not a room of his
own, that he had no refuge in which he could get away from his
mother, from her visitors, and from the voices that were floating
up from the "general room." The satchel and the books lying about
in the corners reminded him of the examination