"Did you think it likely I should try to seduce the mother?" asked Ferdinand in a tone of astonishment.
"Stop these bad jokes," the father said angrily; "the pastor has been here to-day, and requests that you do not set foot in his house again. He refuses to have anything to do with you."
"What a pity!" Ferdinand laughed, throwing his cap down on a pile of papers, and himself at full length upon the sofa. "He is really doing me the greatest favour by releasing me from those dull visits. They are a queer lot. The old man believes that he is living among cannibals, and is always converting somebody or rejoicing at somebody's conversion. The old woman has nothing but water on the brain, in which that learned snail, Józio, swims about. The daughter is sacred like an altar at which only pastors are allowed to officiate. When she has had two children, she will be a skeleton like her mother, and then I congratulate her husband. How dreadfully dull and pedantic all these people are!"
"Very well, they may be pedantic," said his father; "but if you had been with them you would not have squandered sixty thousand roubles."
Ferdinand had just started a yawn, but did not finish it. He sat up on the sofa and looked sorrowfully at his father.
"I see, father, you will never forget those few thousand roubles."
"Certainly I shan't forget them," shouted the old man. "How can a man in his right mind spend so much money for devil knows what? I was going to tell you that yesterday."
Ferdinand took his feet off the sofa, smacked his knee with his hand, and feeling that his father's anger did not go very deep, began:
"My dear father, let us for once in our lives have a reasonable talk. I suppose you do not look upon me any more as a child?"
"You are a monkey," the old man said abruptly. His heart was touched by his son's seriousness.