Platosha almost had a fit when he informed her of his intention. She positively sat down on the ground ... her legs gave way beneath her. ‘To Kazan? why to Kazan?’ she murmured, her dim eyes round with astonishment. She would not have been more surprised if she had been told that her Yasha was going to marry the baker woman next door, or was starting for America. ‘Will you be long in Kazan?’ ‘I shall be back in a week,’ answered Aratov, standing with his back half-turned to his aunt, who was still sitting on the floor. Platonida Ivanovna tried to protest more, but Aratov answered her in an utterly unexpected and unheard-of way: ‘I’m not a child,’ he shouted, and he turned pale all over, his lips trembled, and his eyes glittered wrathfully. ‘I’m twenty-six, I know what I’m about, I’m free to do what I like! I suffer no one ... Give me the money for the journey, pack my box with my clothes and linen ... and don’t torture me! I’ll be back in a week, Platosha,’ he added, in a somewhat softer tone. Platosha got up, sighing and groaning, and, without further protest, crawled to her room. Yasha had alarmed her. ‘I’ve no head on my shoulders,’ she told the cook, who was helping her to pack Yasha’s things; ‘no head at all, but a hive full of bees all a-buzz and a-hum! He’s going off to Kazan, my good soul, to Ka-a-zan!’ The cook, who had observed their dvornik the previous evening talking for a long time with a police officer, would have liked to inform her mistress of this circumstance, but did not dare, and only reflected, ‘To Kazan! if only it’s nowhere farther still!’ Platonida Ivanovna was so upset that she did not even utter her usual prayer. ‘In such a calamity the Lord God Himself cannot aid us!’ The same day Aratov set off for Kazan. XII He had no sooner reached that town and taken a room in a hotel than he rushed off to find out the house of the widow Milovidov. During the whole journey he had been in a sort of benumbed condition, which had not, however, prevented him from taking all the necessary steps, changing at Nizhni-Novgorod from the railway to the steamer, getting his meals at the stations etc., etc. He was convinced as before that _there_ everything would be solved; and therefore he drove away every sort of memory and reflection, confining himself to one thing, the mental rehearsal of the _speech_, in which he would lay before the family of Clara Militch the real cause of his visit. And now at last he reached the goal of his efforts, and sent up his name. He was admitted ... with perplexity and alarm--still he was admitted.