Mechanically I gave him the bridle. He leaped on to Electric … the mare, chill with standing, reared on her haunches, and leaped ten feet away … but my father soon subdued her; he drove the spurs into her sides, and gave her a blow on the neck with his fist…. “Ah, I’ve no whip,” he muttered. I remembered the swish and fall of the whip, heard so short a time before, and shuddered. “Where did you put it?” I asked my father, after a brief pause. My father made no answer, and galloped on ahead. I overtook him. I felt that I must see his face. “Were you bored waiting for me?” he muttered through his teeth. “A little. Where did you drop your whip?” I asked again. My father glanced quickly at me. “I didn’t drop it,” he replied; “I threw it away.” He sank into thought, and dropped his head … and then, for the first, and almost for the last time, I saw how much tenderness and pity his stern features were capable of expressing. He galloped on again, and this time I could not overtake him; I got home a quarter-of-an-hour after him. “That’s love,” I said to myself again, as I sat at night before my writing-table, on which books and papers had begun to make their appearance; “that’s passion!… To think of not revolting, of bearing a blow from any one whatever … even the dearest hand! But it seems one can, if one loves…. While I … I imagined …” I had grown much older during the last month; and my love, with all its transports and sufferings, struck me myself as something small and childish and pitiful beside this other unimagined something, which I could hardly fully grasp, and which frightened me like an unknown, beautiful, but menacing face, which one strives in vain to make out clearly in the half-darkness…. A strange and fearful dream came to me that same night. I dreamed I went into a low dark room…. My father was standing with a whip in his hand, stamping with anger; in the corner crouched Zinaïda, and not on her arm, but on her forehead, was a stripe of red … while behind them both towered Byelovzorov, covered with blood; he opened his white lips, and wrathfully threatened my father. Two months later, I entered the university; and within six months my father died of a stroke in Petersburg, where he had just moved with my mother and me. A few days before his death he received a letter from Moscow which threw him into a violent agitation…. He went to my mother to beg some favour of her: and, I was told, he positively shed tears—he, my father! On the very morning of the day when he was stricken down, he had begun a letter to me in French. “My son,” he wrote to me, “fear the love of woman; fear that bliss, that poison….” After his death, my mother sent a considerable sum of money to Moscow. XXII