But she married Alfonsky. Unhappy and offended by Alfonsky (she slapped his mistress in the face) she renewed relations with her first lover who happened to turn up at that time. The boy saw them kissing. “You may report it to your father,” and then begged him not to tell. The boy kept silence; but Alfonsky knows that his son knows that he has horns and that the step-mother has a lover. He made a row in the village on account of the lame girl. He mocked Katya. The mother was beside herself because of Katya. In town with _Lambert_—and so on. _Here_ (Al——y) who made a row in the village, the peasants _might_ have killed him, which the boy might witness,—and— (I may make up about the step-mother and her lover, and to what extent and degree the boy is _involved_ in that liaison.) —Alfonsky has a benefactor—and indeed his chief enemy, because he is a benefactor. All the benefactor’s favours humiliate his pride. The benefactor does not like to live unless he can act the part of benefactor, but for one inch of favour demands three yards of gratitude. Both humiliate themselves, humiliate each other, and hate each other to the verge of illness. -------------- Page 17. —The extraordinary pride of the boy has the result that he can neither pity nor despise these men. Nor can he be very indignant with them. He cannot sympathize either with his father or mother. At the exam, he distinguished himself unexpectedly,—he wanted to appear an imbecile. He despises himself greatly because he could not restrain himself and distinguished himself. —The dangerous and uncommon idea that he is to become an extraordinary man possessed him from his first childhood. He thinks of it incessantly. Cleverness, skill, learning—all these he wishes to acquire as a means to being extraordinary in the future. Again money seems to him at least not unnecessary, a power useful on all occasions, and he decides on money: Knowledge appears to him terribly difficult. Now again it seems to him that even if he is not to be an extraordinary man, but most ordinary, money will give him everything,—_i.e._ power and the right to despise— And at last he repents and is tormented in his conscience because he wishes so basely to be extraordinary. But he himself does not know what he will be. The pure ideal of a free man flashes across him at times; all this when at the boarding school. ――――――――――――――――― —He made friends with Osip, about the Khlysti, they almost sleep together. —Umnov; he knows Gogol by heart. -------------- Page 70.