“No, you are a fanatic, not I! You!” And Vera Semyonovna dissolved into tears again. Her brother stood before her, looked at her quivering shoulders, and thought. He thought, not of the agonies of loneliness endured by any one who begins to think in a new way of their own, not of the inevitable sufferings of a genuine spiritual revolution, but of the outrage of his programme, the outrage to his author’s vanity.
From this time he treated his sister coldly, with careless irony, and he endured her presence in the room as one endures the presence of old women that are dependent on one. For her part, she left off disputing with him and met all his arguments, jeers, and attacks with a condescending silence which irritated him more than ever.
One summer morning Vera Semyonovna, dressed for travelling with a satchel over her shoulder, went in to her brother and coldly kissed him on the forehead.
“Where are you going?” he asked with surprise.
“To the province of N. to do vaccination work.” Her brother went out into the street with her.
“So that’s what you’ve decided upon, you queer girl,” he muttered. “Don’t you want some money?”
“No, thank you. Good-bye.”
The sister shook her brother’s hand and set off.
“Why don’t you have a cab?” cried Vladimir Semyonitch.
She did not answer. Her brother gazed after her, watched her rusty-looking waterproof, the swaying of her figure as she slouched along, forced himself to sigh, but did not succeed in rousing a feeling of regret. His sister had become a stranger to him. And he was a stranger to her. Anyway, she did not once look round.