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"I will go back," he thought, "and will go by the morning train to-morrow. . . . I will say I have missed the train." And he turned back. . . . Madame Shumihin, Maman, Nyuta, and one of the nieces were sitting on the verandah, playing vint. When Volodya told them the lie that he had missed the train, they were uneasy that he might be late for the examination day, and advised him to get up early.
Volodya heard Madame Shumihin open her window with a bang, heard Nyuta go off into a peal of laughter in reply to her coarse voice. Nyuta was wearing a Little Russian dress which did not suit her at all, and made her look clumsy; the architect was making dull and vulgar jokes. The rissoles served at lunch had too much onion in them so it seemed to Volodya.
After he had gone away maman began telling the music teacher how she had been staying at the Shumihins', and how warmly they welcomed her. "Lili Shumihin is a relation of mine, you know," she said. "Her late husband, General Shumihin, was a cousin of my husband. And she was a Baroness Kolb by birth. . . ." "Maman, that's false!" said Volodya irritably. "Why tell lies?"
Combing his hair before the looking-glass, and looking at his ugly face, pale from his sleepless night, he thought: "It's perfectly true . . . an ugly duckling!" When maman saw him and was horrified that he was not at his examination, Volodya said: "I overslept myself, maman. . . . But don't worry, I will get a medical certificate." Madame Shumihin and Nyuta waked up at one o'clock.
He crossed the terrace, the big hall and the drawing-room, and there stopped to take breath. He could hear them in the dining-room, drinking tea. Madame Shumihin, maman, and Nyuta were talking and laughing about something. Volodya listened. "I assure you!" said Nyuta. "I could not believe my eyes!
He walked three times up and down the avenue, grew a little calmer, and went into the house. "Why didn't you come in in time for tea?" Madame Shumihin asked sternly. "I am sorry, it's . . . it's time for me to go," he muttered, not raising his eyes. "Maman, it's eight o'clock!" "You go alone, my dear," said his maman languidly. "I am staying the night with Lili.
In the second place, his presence at the villa of the Shumihins, a wealthy family with aristocratic pretensions, was a continual source of mortification to his amour-propre. It seemed to him that Madame Shumihin looked upon him and his maman as poor relations and dependents, that they laughed at his maman and did not respect her.
He had on one occasion accidently overheard Madame Shumihin, in the verandah, telling her cousin Anna Fyodorovna that his maman still tried to look young and got herself up, that she never paid her losses at cards, and had a partiality for other people's shoes and tobacco.
He knew perfectly well that what his mother said was true; in what she was saying about General Shumihin and about Baroness Kolb there was not a word of lying, but nevertheless he felt that she was lying. There was a suggestion of falsehood in her manner of speaking, in the expression of her face, in her eyes, in everything.
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