Youth is a surprisingly concrete thing, possessing faculties of its own—a terrible clear-sightedness, for one thing, and a black-and-white ruled-out sense of justice and injustice; it brought an absolutely new sense of values to Dosia. It was when she was seventeen that it began to dawn upon her that the conditions at home, always looked upon as entirely temporary and sporadic by her father and stepmother, were really the inevitable expressions of law. She saw that the true character of her parents was quite different from their own idea of it; that they would never change materially, and therefore, in the very nature of things, their fortunes could never change materially; they would always be going a little faster or a little slower on a down grade. She wondered at the exhaustless capacity of complacently believing in worn fallacies which her young eyes saw pitilessly as such. Her stepmother still looked upon the father, as he did upon himself, as a successful and energetic man of business for the moment only disabled by his failing health, and believed herself to be always on the point of managing the little money they had with superhuman economy, so that it would cover all household emergencies; only Dosia knew that there could never be more money, and that what there was must always slip away. This knowledge laid the future waste and rendered effort futile. What was the use, for instance, of putting cushions on the lounge over the place where there was a big hole in the cover, until they could buy the new one? There never would be a new one. What was the use of pretending that when the cracked and heterogeneous plates and dishes were replaced the table would be properly set once more? They never would be replaced.