fact that there
were signs of trouble in the province, of which we will speak later, he
had private reasons for brooding, his heart was wounded, not merely his
official dignity. When Andrey Antonovitch had entered upon married life,
he had never conceived the possibility of conjugal strife, or dissension
in the future. It was inconsistent with the dreams he had cherished
all his life of his Minna or Ernestine. He felt that he was unequal to
enduring domestic storms. Yulia Mihailovna had an open explanation with
him at last.

"You can't be angry at this," she said, "if only because you've still as
much sense as he has, and are immeasurably higher in the social scale.
The boy still preserves many traces of his old free-thinking habits;
I believe it's simply mischief; but one can do nothing suddenly, in a
hurry; you must do things by degrees. We must make much of our young
people; I treat them with affection and hold them back from the brink."

"But he says such dreadful things," Von Lembke objected. "I can't behave
tolerantly when he maintains in my presence and before other people
that the government purposely drenches the people with vodka in order to
brutalise them, and so keep them from revolution. Fancy my position when
I'm forced to listen to that before every one."

As he said this, Von Lembke recalled a conversation he had recently
had with Pyotr Stepanovitch. With the innocent object of displaying his
Liberal tendencies he had shown him his own private collection of every
possible kind of manifesto, Russian and foreign, which he had carefully
collected since the year 1859, not simply from a love of collecting but
from a laudable interest in them. Pyotr Stepanovitch, seeing his object,
expressed the opinion that there was more sense in one line of some
manifestoes than in a whole government department, "not even excluding
yours, maybe."

Lembke winced.

"But this is premature among us, premature," he pronounced almost
imploringly, pointing to the manifestoes.

"No, it's not premature; you see you're afraid, so it's not premature."

"But here, for instance, is an incitement to destroy churches."

"And why not? You're a sensible man, and of course you don't believe
in it yourself, but you know perfectly well that you need religion to
brutalise the people. Truth is honester than falsehood...."

"I agree, I agree, I quite agree with you, but it is premature,
premature in this country..." said Von Lembke, fr