Vasili Ivanitch paused.
"Do you not think," he said, "that it would be better to cauterise the finger with an iron?"
"No, I do not. Moreover, that ought, in any case, to have been done sooner; whereas by now even the hell-stone is unlikely to prove effectual, seeing that, as you know, once absorbed into the system, the germ renders all remedies too late."
"How 'too late'?" gasped Vasili Ivanitch.
"What I say. Four hours have elapsed since the injury."
Vasili Ivanitch gave the wound a further cauterisation. "So the district physician had no hell-stone?" he queried.
"None."
"God in heaven! To think of that man calling himself a doctor, yet being without such an indispensable remedy!"
"You should have seen his lancets!" remarked Bazarov. Then he left the room.
Throughout that evening and the next few days Vasili Ivanitch kept making every possible excuse to enter his son's room; and though he never actually referred to the wound—he even strove to confine his conversation to purely extraneous subjects—his observation of his son remained so persistent, his solicitude so marked, that at length Bazarov, losing patience, bade him begone. Of course Vasili Ivanitch promised not to repeat the intrusion; and as a matter of fact he kept this promise the more religiously in that Arina Vlasievna (who had had the matter carefully concealed from her) was beginning to scent something in the wind, and to press for reasons why, during the previous night, her husband had never once closed his eyes. Accordingly, for the next two days Vasili Ivanitch faithfully observed the undertaking he had given; and that although the covert observation of his son's looks which he maintained showed them to be growing by no means to his liking: but on the third day, during dinner, Vasili Ivanitch could bear it no more, for Bazarov was sitting with his eyes lowered and his plate empty.