ovitch was overwhelmed, and began to ponder. There
might in the past have been a hope that his son would not come,
after all--an outsider, that is to say, might have hoped so. Stepan
Trofimovitch as a father would have indignantly rejected the
insinuation that he could entertain such a hope. Anyway queer rumours
had hitherto been reaching us about Petrusha. To begin with, on
completing his studies at the university six years before, he had hung
about in Petersburg without getting work. Suddenly we got the news that
he had taken part in issuing some anonymous manifesto and that he
was implicated in the affair. Then he suddenly turned up abroad in
Switzerland at Geneva--he had escaped, very likely.

"It's surprising to me," Stepan Trofimovitch commented, greatly
disconcerted. "Petrusha, _c'est une si pauvre tete!_ He's good,
noble-hearted, very sensitive, and I was so delighted with him in
Petersburg, comparing him with the young people of to-day. But _c'est un
pauvre sire, tout de meme_.... And you know it all comes from that
same half-bakedness, that sentimentality. They are fascinated, not by
realism, but by the emotional ideal side of socialism, by the religious
note in it, so to say, by the poetry of it... second-hand, of course.
And for me, for me, think what it means! I have so many enemies here and
more still _there_, they'll put it down to the father's influence. Good
God! Petrusha a revolutionist! What times we live in!"

Very soon, however, Petrusha sent his exact address from Switzerland for
money to be sent him as usual; so he could not be exactly an exile.
And now, after four years abroad, he was suddenly making his appearance
again in his own country, and announced that he would arrive shortly,
so there could be no charge against him. What was more, some one seemed
to be interested in him and protecting him. He wrote now from the south
of Russia, where he was busily engaged in some private but important
business. All this was capital, but where was his father to get that
other seven or eight thousand, to make up a suitable price for the
estate? And what if there should be an outcry, and instead of that
imposing picture it should come to a lawsuit? Something told Stepan
Trofimovitch that the sensitive Petrusha would not relinquish anything
that was to his interest. "Why is it--as I've noticed," Stepan
Trofimovitch whispered to me once, "why is it that all these desperate
socialists and communists are at the