st; no botanist would think of studying
each individual birch-tree.'

Katya, who was arranging the flowers, one at a time in a leisurely
fashion, lifted her eyes to Bazarov with a puzzled look, and meeting
his rapid and careless glance, she crimsoned up to her ears. Anna
Sergyevna shook her head.

'The trees in a forest,' she repeated. 'Then according to you there is
no difference between the stupid and the clever person, between the
good-natured and ill-natured?'

'No, there is a difference, just as between the sick and the healthy.
The lungs of a consumptive patient are not in the same condition as
yours and mine, though they are made on the same plan. We know
approximately what physical diseases come from; moral diseases come
from bad education, from all the nonsense people's heads are stuffed
with from childhood up, from the defective state of society; in short,
reform society, and there will be no diseases.'

Bazarov said all this with an air, as though he were all the while
thinking to himself, 'Believe me or not, as you like, it's all one to
me!' He slowly passed his fingers over his whiskers, while his eyes
strayed about the room.

'And you conclude,' observed Anna Sergyevna, 'that when society is
reformed, there will be no stupid nor wicked people?'

'At any rate, in a proper organisation of society, it will be
absolutely the same whether a man is stupid or clever, wicked or good.'

'Yes, I understand; they will all have the same spleen.'

'Precisely so, madam.'

Madame Odintsov turned to Arkady. 'And what is your opinion, Arkady
Nikolaevitch?'

'I agree with Yevgeny,' he answered.

Katya looked up at him from under her eyelids.

'You amaze me, gentlemen,' commented Madame Odintsov, 'but we will have
more talk together. But now I hear my aunt coming to tea; we must spare
her.'

Anna Sergyevna's aunt, Princess H----, a thin little woman with a
pinched-up face, drawn together like a fist, and staring
ill-natured-looking eyes under a grey front, came in, and, scarcely
bowing to the guests, she dropped into a wide velvet covered arm-chair,
upon which no one but herself was privileged to sit. Katya put a
footstool under her feet; the old lady did not thank her, did not even
look at her, only her hands shook under the yellow shawl, which almost
covered her feeble body. The Princess liked yellow; her cap, too, had
bright yellow ribbons.

'How have you slept, aunt?' inquired Madame Odintsov, raising