ked that the younger Iwin had fought shy of
us, and seemed to give himself airs. The elder of the pair, I had heard,
had now finished his course in jurisprudence, and gone to hold a post
in St. Petersburg, while his brother Sergius (the former object of my
worship) was also in St. Petersburg, as a great fat cadet in the Corps
of Pages.

When I was a young man, not only did I dislike intercourse with people
who thought themselves above me, but such intercourse was, for me, an
unbearable torture, owing partly to my constant dread of being snubbed,
and partly to my straining every faculty of my intellect to prove to
such people my independence. Yet, even if I failed to fulfil the latter
part of my father's instructions, I felt that I must carry out
the former. I paced my room and eyed my clothes ready disposed on
chairs--the tunic, the sword, and the cap. Just as I was about to set
forth, old Grap called to congratulate me, bringing with him Ilinka.
Grap pere was a Russianised German and an intolerably effusive,
sycophantic old man who was more often than not tipsy. As a rule, he
visited us only when he wanted to ask for something, and although Papa
sometimes entertained him in his study, old Grap never came to dinner
with us. With his subserviency and begging propensities went such a
faculty of good-humour and a power of making himself at home that every
one looked upon his attachment to us as a great honour. For my part,
however, I never liked him, and felt ashamed when he was speaking.

I was much put out by the arrival of these visitors, and made no effort
to conceal the fact. Upon Ilinka I had been so used to look down, and he
so used to recognise my right to do so, that it displeased me to think
that he was now as much a matriculated student as myself. In some way
he appeared to me to have made a POINT of attaining that equality. I
greeted the pair coldly, and, without offering them any refreshment
(since it went against the grain to do so, and I thought they could ask
for anything, if they wanted it, without my first inviting them to state
their requirements), gave orders for the drozhki to be got ready. Ilinka
was a good-natured, extremely moral, and far from stupid young fellow;
yet, for all that, what people call a person of moods. That is to say,
for no apparent reason he was for ever in some PRONOUNCED frame of
mind--now lachrymose, now frivolous, now touchy on the very smallest
point. At the present moment he