ase--"Comme c'est tres jolie!" or the
like. Or again, feigning to look serious and stolidly wise, he would say
something absolutely meaningless and bearing no relation whatever to the
question asked him, or else suddenly exclaim, with a look of
pretended unconsciousness, the word bulku or poyechali or kapustu,
[Respectively, "roll of butter," "away," and "cabbage."] or something of
the kind; and when, afterwards, I happened to repeat these words to him
as having been told me by Lubotshka or Katenka, he would always remark:

"Hm! So you actually care about talking to them? I can see you are a
duffer still"--and one needed to see and near him to appreciate the
profound, immutable contempt which echoed in this remark. He had been
grown-up now two years, and was in love with every good-looking woman
that he met; yet, despite the fact that he came in daily contact with
Katenka (who during those two years had been wearing long dresses, and
was growing prettier every day), the possibility of his falling in love
with her never seemed to enter his head. Whether this proceeded from the
fact that the prosaic recollections of childhood were still too fresh
in his memory, or whether from the aversion which very young people
feel for everything domestic, or whether from the common human weakness
which, at a first encounter with anything fair and pretty, leads a man
to say to himself, "Ah! I shall meet much more of the same kind during
my life," but at all events Woloda had never yet looked upon Katenka
with a man's eyes.

All that summer Woloda appeared to find things very wearisome--a fact
which arose out of that contempt for us all which, as I have said,
he made no effort to conceal. His expression of face seemed to be
constantly saying, "Phew! how it bores me to have no one to speak to!"
The first thing in the morning he would go out shooting, or sit reading
a book in his room, and not dress until luncheon time. Indeed, if
Papa was not at home, he would take his book into that meal, and go on
reading it without addressing so much as a single word to any one of us,
who felt, somehow, guilty in his presence. In the evening, too, he would
stretch himself on a settee in the drawing-room, and either go to sleep,
propped on his elbow, or tell us farcical stories--sometimes stories so
improper as to make Mimi grow angry and blush, and ourselves die with
laughter. At other times he would not condescend to address a single
serious word to