won't take me in.'
Nikolai Artemyevitch's _frondeurism_ consisted in saying, for instance,
when he heard the word nerves: 'And what do you mean by nerves?' or
if some one alluded in his presence to the discoveries of astronomy,
asking: 'And do you believe in astronomy?' When he wanted to overwhelm
his opponent completely, he said: 'All that is nothing but words.' It
must be admitted that to many persons remarks of that kind seemed
(and still seem) irrefutable arguments. But Nikolai Artemyevitch never
suspected that Augustina Christianovna, in letters to her cousin,
Theodolina Peterzelius, called him _Mein Pinselchen_.

Nikolai Artemyevitch's wife, Anna Vassilyevna, was a thin, little woman
with delicate features, and a tendency to be emotional and melancholy.
At school, she had devoted herself to music and reading novels;
afterwards she abandoned all that. She began to be absorbed in
dress, and that, too, she gave up. She did, for a time, undertake her
daughter's education, but she got tired of that too, and handed her
over to a governess. She ended by spending her whole time in sentimental
brooding and tender melancholy. The birth of Elena Nikolaevna had ruined
her health, and she could never have another child. Nikolai Artemyevitch
used to hint at this fact in justification of his intimacy with
Augustina Christianovna. Her husband's infidelity wounded Anna
Vassilyevna deeply; she had been specially hurt by his once giving
his German woman, on the sly, a pair of grey horses out of her (Anna
Vassilyevna's) own stable. She had never reproached him to his face, but
she complained of him secretly to every one in the house in turn, even
to her daughter. Anna Vassilyevna did not care for going out, she liked
visitors to come and sit with her and talk to her; she collapsed at once
when she was left alone. She had a very tender and loving heart; life
had soon crushed her.

Pavel Yakovlitch Shubin happened to be a distant cousin of hers. His
father had been a government official in Moscow. His brothers had
entered cadets' corps; he was the youngest, his mother's darling, and
of delicate constitution; he stopped at home. They intended him for the
university, and strained every effort to keep him at the gymnasium.
From his early years he began to show an inclination for sculpture.
The ponderous senator, Volgin, saw a statuette of his one day at his
aunt's--he was then sixteen--and declared that he intended to protect
this yout