ulation was all that
found tongue in the serf's quarters that night.

For many hours that afternoon--in fact, till darkness fell--Ivan sat
over the samovar, drank glass after glass of tea, rolled cigarette after
cigarette, and found himself at last still staring at a blank
horizon-line, upon which not one picture consented to appear. Yet,
reason with himself as he would, he knew that the heart within him was
surging with joy. He was going out into the great world of Petersburg,
his own master at last. He was going into the world of light, of gayety,
of wealth; of the army, the court, of--of Nathalie Dravikine! Ay, it was
true! That little love--that first, foolish love--lived in him still,
having survived all the changes of his past changing years. Was it then
to die, now, when his passion was about to be fired afresh by the
presence of its living object?

Pondering thus, Ivan inhaled his cigarette-smoke, and felt the fine
thrills of a subtle intoxication creeping along his nerves till, at
length, his thoughts took a new turn. Standing, as he did, upon a
threshold, looking through an open doorway out upon active life, he
considered those things which he should force from the world for
himself; and first of these, in his desire, was that knowledge which
results only from experience. Kept all his life in the shadows of an
unscalable wall of officialism, there had, nevertheless, reached his
ears the first inarticulate rumors of that great movement of the youth
of Russia towards enlightenment, towards education, towards individual
understanding--a movement unique in the annals of the educational
history of the world. From this period for many years all the youth of
that tremendous Empire--every boy, every _girl_, from the highest to the
lowest, was to rise up, alone, uninfluenced, demanding of age and
guardianship the right to go forth into the world to work, to study--to
learn, in fine, how a great country might in the future be developed.
For a long time, even at Klin, within the walls of the Corps, Ivan had
heard tales almost incredible in their strangeness of bitterness and
rupture among the finest families between father and son, mother and
daughter:--the members of the old regime against the self-constituted
advocates of the new. Nor did a few months put an end to this
incomprehensible movement. Sonya Kovalevsky, in the company of her
chivalrously nominal young husband, had left her parental estate and was
at work i