ssion to travel abroad. It was refused. Then, taking his son
with him, he wandered about Russia for three whole years, trying one
doctor after another, incessantly journeying from place to place, and,
by his impatient fretfulness, driving his doctors, his son, and his
servants to the verge of despair. Utterly used up[A], he returned to
Lavriki a weeping and capricious infant. Days of bitterness ensued,
in which all suffered at his hands. He was quiet only while he was
feeding. Never had he eaten so much, nor so greedily. At all other
moments he allowed neither himself nor any one else to be at peace. He
prayed, grumbled at fate, found fault with himself, with his system,
with politics, with all which he used to boast of, with all that he
had ever set up as a model for his son. He would declare that he
believed in nothing, and then he would betake himself again to prayer;
he could not bear a single moment of solitude, and he compelled
his servants constantly to sit near his bed day and night, and to
entertain him with stories, which he was in the habit of interrupting
by exclamations of, "You're all telling lies!" or, "What utter
nonsense!"

[Footnote A: Literally, "a regular rag."]

Glafira Petrovna had the largest share in all the trouble he gave. He
was absolutely unable to do without her; and until the very end she
fulfilled all the invalid's caprices, though sometimes she was unable
to reply immediately to what he said, for fear the tone of her voice
should betray the anger which was almost choking her. So he creaked
on for two years more, and at length one day in the beginning of the
month of May, he died. He had been carried out to the balcony, and
planed there in the sun. "Glasha! Glashka! broth, broth, you old
idi--," lisped his stammering tongue; and then, without completing the
last word, it became silent forever. Glafira, who had just snatched
the cup of broth from the hands of the major-domo, stopped short,
looked her brother in the face, very slowly crossed herself, and went
silently away. And his son, who happened also to be on the spot, did
not say a word either, but bent over the railing of the balcony, and
gazed for a long time into the garden, all green and fragrant, all
sparkling in the golden sunlight of spring. He was twenty-three years
old; how sadly, how swiftly had those years passed by unmarked! Life
opened out before him now.

XII.

After his father's burial, having confided to the