“Well, what have you done since we last met?” she asked gaily. “Whom have you met? Have you been discoursing on the ‘new strength’ or the ‘dawn of the future,’ or ‘young hopes?’ Every day I live in anxious expectation.”
“No, no,” laughed Mark. “I have ceased to bother about the people here; it is not worth while to tackle them.”
“God grant it were so. You would have done well if you had acted up to what you say. But I cannot be happy about you. At the Sfogins, the youngest son, Volodya, who is fourteen, declared to his mother that he was not going any more to Mass. When he was whipped, and questioned, he pointed to his eldest brother, who had sneaked into the servants’ room and there preached to the maids the whole evening that it was stupid to observe the fasts of the Church, to go through the ceremony of marriage, that there was no God....”
Mark looked at her in horror.
“In the servants’ room! And yet I talked to him for a whole evening as if he were a man capable of reason, and gave him books....”
“Which he took straight to the bookseller. ‘These are the books you ought to put on sale,’ he said. Did you not give me your promise,” she said reproachfully, “when we parted and you begged to see me again?”
“All that is long past. I have had nothing more to do with those people since I gave you that promise. Don’t be angry, Vera. But for you I would escape from this neighbourhood to-morrow.”
“Escape—where? Everywhere there are the same opportunities; boys who would like to see their moustaches grow quicker, servants’ rooms, if independent men and women will not listen to your talk. Are you not ashamed of the part you play?” she asked after a brief pause. “Do you look on it as your mission?”
She stroked his bent head affectionately as she spoke. At her last words he raised his head quickly.
“What part do I play? I give a baptism of pure water.”