These arguments reminded Nekhludoff of an answer he had once received from a schoolboy. He asked the boy whether he had learned the declension of nouns. "Yes," answered the boy. "Well, then decline 'Paw.'" "What paw? A dog's paw?" the boy answered, with a sly expression on his face. Similar answers in the form of questions Nekhludoff found in scientific books to his one basic question. He found there many wise, learned and interesting things, but there was no answer to his principal question: By what right do some people punish others? Not only was there no answer, but all reasoning tended to explain and justify punishment, the necessity of which was considered an axiom. Nekhludoff read much, but only by fits and starts, and the want of an answer he ascribed to such superficial reading. He, therefore, refused to believe in the justice of the answer which constantly occurred to him. CHAPTER XIX. The deportation of the party of convicts to which Maslova belonged was set for the fifth of July, and Nekhludoff was prepared to follow her on that day. The day before his departure his sister, with her husband, arrived in town to see him. Nekhludoff's sister, Natalie Ivanovna Ragojhinsky, was ten years his senior. He had grown up partly under her influence. She loved him when he was a boy, and before her marriage they treated each other as equals; she was twenty-five and he was fifteen. She had been in love then with his deceased friend, Nikolenka Irtenieff. They both loved Nikolenka, and loved in him and in themselves the good that was in them, and which unifies all people. Since that time they had both became corrupted--he by the bad life he was leading; she by her marriage to a man whom she loved sensually, but who not only did not love all that which she and Dimitri at one time considered most holy and precious, but did not even understand it, and all those aspirations to moral perfection and to serving others, to which she had once devoted herself, he ascribed to selfishness and a desire to show off before people.