“Really, why are you so sad?” asked Foma again, glancing at her gloomy face.
She turned to him and said with enthusiasm and anxiety:
“Ah, Foma! What a book I’ve read! If you could only understand it!”
“It must be a good book, since it worked you up in this way,” said Foma, smiling.
“I did not sleep. I read all night long. Just think of it: you read—and it seems to you that the gates of another kingdom are thrown open before you. And the people there are different, and their language is different, everything different! Life itself is different there.”
“I don’t like this,” said Foma, dissatisfied. “That’s all fiction, deceit; so is the theatre. The merchants are ridiculed there. Are they really so stupid? Of course! Take your father, for example.”
“The theatre and the school are one and the same, Foma,” said Luba, instructively. “The merchants used to be like this. And what deceit can there be in books?”
“Just as in fairy—tales, nothing is real.”
“You are wrong! You have read no books; how can you judge? Books are precisely real. They teach you how to live.”
“Come, come!” Foma waved his hand. “Drop it; no good will come out of your books! There, take your father, for example, does he read books? And yet he is clever! I looked at him today and envied him. His relations with everybody are so free, so clever, he has a word for each and every one. You can see at once that whatever he should desire he is sure to attain.”