XLV. I COME TO GRIEF

At length the first examination--on differentials and integrals--drew
near, but I continued in a vague state which precluded me from forming
any clear idea of what was awaiting me. Every evening, after consorting
with Zuchin and the rest, the thought would occur to me that there was
something in my convictions which I must change--something wrong and
mistaken; yet every morning the daylight would find me again satisfied
to be "comme il faut," and desirous of no change whatsoever.

Such was the frame of mind in which I attended for the first
examination. I seated myself on the bench where the princes, counts,
and barons always sat, and began talking to them in French, with the not
unnatural result that I never gave another thought to the answers
which I was shortly to return to questions in a subject of which I
knew nothing. I gazed supinely at other students as they went up to be
examined, and even allowed myself to chaff some of them.

"Well, Grap," I said to Ilinka (who, from our first entry into the
University, had shaken off my influence, had ceased to smile when I
spoke to him, and always remained ill-disposed towards me), "have you
survived the ordeal?"

"Yes," retorted Ilinka. "Let us see if YOU can do so."

I smiled contemptuously at the answer, notwithstanding that the doubt
which he had expressed had given me a momentary shock. Once again,
however, indifference overlaid that feeling, and I remained so entirely
absent-minded and supine that, the very moment after I had been examined
(a mere formality for me, as it turned out) I was making a dinner
appointment with Baron Z. When called out with Ikonin, I smoothed
the creases in my uniform, and walked up to the examiner's table with
perfect sang froid.

True, a slight shiver of apprehension ran down my back when the young
professor--the same one as had examined me for my matriculation--looked
me straight in the face as I reached across to the envelope containing
the tickets. Ikonin, though taking a ticket with the same plunge of his
whole body as he had done at the previous examinations, did at least
return some sort of an answer this time, though a poor one. I, on the
contrary, did just as he had done on the two previous occasions, or even
worse, since I took a second ticket, yet for a second time returned no
answer. The professor looked me compassionately in the face, and said in
a quiet, but determined, voice:

"You will not