about my mother! It was from him I
first heard them."

"Oh, I meant that in a higher sense! Oh, you didn't understand me! You
understood nothing, nothing."

"But, anyway, it was meaner in you than in me, meaner, acknowledge that.
You see, it's nothing to me if you like. I'm speaking from your point
of view. Don't worry about my point of view. I don't blame my mother; if
it's you, then it's you, if it's a Pole, then it's a Pole, it's all the
same to me. I'm not to blame because you and she managed so stupidly in
Berlin. As though you could have managed things better. Aren't you an
absurd set, after that? And does it matter to you whether I'm your son
or not? Listen," he went on, turning to me again, "he's never spent a
penny on me all his life; till I was sixteen he didn't know me at all;
afterwards he robbed me here, and now he cries out that his heart has
been aching over me all his life, and carries on before me like an
actor. I'm not Varvara Petrovna, mind you."

He got up and took his hat.

"I curse you henceforth!"

Stepan Trofimovitch, as pale as death, stretched out his hand above him.

"Ach, what folly a man will descend to!" cried Pyotr Stepanovitch,
actually surprised. "Well, good-bye, old fellow, I shall never come and
see you again. Send me the article beforehand, don't forget, and try and
let it be free from nonsense. Facts, facts, facts. And above all, let it
be short. Good-bye."

III

Outside influences, too, had come into play in the matter, however.
Pyotr Stepanovitch certainly had some designs on his parent. In my
opinion he calculated upon reducing the old man to despair, and so to
driving him to some open scandal of a certain sort. This was to serve
some remote and quite other object of his own, of which I shall speak
hereafter. All sorts of plans and calculations of this kind were
swarming in masses in his mind at that time, and almost all, of course,
of a fantastic character. He had designs on another victim besides Stepan
Trofimovitch. In fact, as appeared afterwards, his victims were not few
in number, but this one he reckoned upon particularly, and it was Mr.
von Lembke himself.

Andrey Antonovitch von Lembke belonged to that race, so favoured by
nature, which is reckoned by hundreds of thousands at the Russian
census, and is perhaps unconscious that it forms throughout its whole
mass a strictly organised union. And this union, of course, is not
planned and premeditated, but exists