'I feel sorry for your mother particularly.'
'Why's that? Has she won your heart with strawberries, or what?'
Arkady dropped his eyes. 'You don't understand your mother, Yevgeny. She's not only a very good woman, she's very clever really. This morning she talked to me for half-an-hour, and so sensibly, interestingly.'
'I suppose she was expatiating upon me all the while?'
'We didn't talk only about you.'
'Perhaps; lookers-on see most. If a woman can keep up half-an-hour's conversation, it's always a hopeful sign. But I'm going, all the same.'
'It won't be very easy for you to break it to them. They are always making plans for what we are to do in a fortnight's time.'
'No; it won't be easy. Some demon drove me to tease my father to-day; he had one of his rent-paying peasants flogged the other day, and quite right too—yes, yes, you needn't look at me in such horror—he did quite right, because he's an awful thief and drunkard; only my father had no idea that I, as they say, was cognisant of the facts. He was greatly perturbed, and now I shall have to upset him more than ever.... Never mind! Never say die! He'll get over it!'
Bazarov said, 'Never mind'; but the whole day passed before he could make up his mind to inform Vassily Ivanovitch of his intentions. At last, when he was just saying good-night to him in the study, he observed, with a feigned yawn—
'Oh ... I was almost forgetting to tell you.... Send to Fedot's for our horses to-morrow.'