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"That little man is like a schoolfellow of mine called Niskubin," says Styopa. "Turn over. . . . 'The proboscis of the common house-fly seen under the microscope. So that's a proboscis! I say a fly. Whatever would a bug look like under a microscope, my boy? Wouldn't it be horrid!" The old-fashioned clock in the drawing-room does not strike, but coughs ten times huskily as though it had a cold.
Agafya Mikhailovna knew about it and anxiously waited for the news of whether he had got through. Once she put up a candle before the eikon and prayed that Styopa might pass. But at that moment she remembered that her borzois had got out and had not come back to the kennels again. "Saints in heaven! they'll get into some place and worry the cattle and do a mischief!" she cried.
Pavel Vassilitch and Styopa sit side by side, with their heads touching, and, bending over the table, examine a volume of the "Neva" for 1878. "'The monument of Leonardo da Vinci, facing the gallery of Victor Emmanuel at Milan. I say! . . . After the style of a triumphal arch. . . . A cavalier with his lady. . . . And there are little men in the distance. . . ."
"How can you go without your supper before the fast? You'll have nothing but Lenten food all through the fast!" Pavel Vassilitch is scared too. "Yes, yes, my boy," he says. "For seven weeks mother will give you nothing but Lenten food. You can't miss the last supper before the fast." "Oh dear, I am sleepy," says Styopa peevishly.
"What is it you don't understand?" Pavel Vassilitch asks Styopa. "Why this . . . division of fractions," the boy answers crossly. "The division of fractions by fractions. . . ." "H'm . . . queer boy! What is there in it? There's nothing to understand in it.
A silence follows. Styopa yawns loudly, and scrutinises the Chinaman on the tea-caddy whom he has seen a thousand times already. Markovna and the two aunts sip tea carefully out of their saucers. The air is still and stifling from the stove. . . . Faces and gestures betray the sloth and repletion that comes when the stomach is full, and yet one must go on eating.
But he took Katya's book and wrote in it as a souvenir: "Montehomo, the Hawk's Claw, Chief of the Ever Victorious." "PAVEL VASSILITCH!" cries Pelageya Ivanovna, waking her husband. "Pavel Vassilitch! You might go and help Styopa with his lessons, he is sitting crying over his book. He can't understand something again!"
"You are a pig to do that, not a cat. . . ." From the dining-room there is a door leading into the nursery. There, at a table covered with stains and deep scratches, sits Styopa, a high-school boy in the second class, with a peevish expression of face and tear-stained eyes.
"Daddy, darling," a child's voice was tenderly entreating, "let's go back to uncle! There is a Christmas-tree there! Styopa and Kolya are there!" "My darling, what can I do?" a man's bass persuaded softly. "Understand me! Come, understand!" And the man's weeping blended with the child's.
Styopa stares at the finger with the wedding ring, listens to the unintelligible words, and dozes; he rubs his eyelids with his fists, and they shut all the tighter. "I am going to bed . . ." he says, stretching and yawning. "What, to bed?" says Pelageya Ivanovna. "What about supper before the fast?" "I don't want any." "Are you crazy?" says his mother in alarm.
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