But the new young man is on good terms with the father. He has evidently plenty of money of his own, and he is a persona grata.
“What of Sasha?” I ask Katia aside.
“We quarrelled,” says she. “God, how we quarrelled! We were rowing in a boat on the Dnieper, and when I told him it was no good, we could never be married, he shot at me with a revolver. I had to save myself by jumping into the water.”
“You’ve chosen a nice young man this time. Perhaps you are more likely to be happy with him.”
“Yes. Everybody likes him.”
Fedor is certainly a relief after the sternness of Sasha. He is affable, he is interested in the prices of all things, and is bourgeois, but he says that success and money and luxury do not tempt him. He would like to give up everything and try and find out what life means. He would like to be a wanderer as I am, or to go into a monastery.
All the same, the career assigned to him seems to be that of a lawyer, and as a lawyer, not as a vagabond, will he win the hand of Katia. He will live with her as a wealthy bourgeois European, and not as a Russian.
This modern Kief is a mill where purely Russian types go in and Europeans come out.
“Once a European, always a European,” says some one.
“A European may become an American,” I hazard.