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320 belonging to the head of the family, because the head of the family can turn everybody out of his room who enters without asking permission. Into all the others, everybody who is older or contemporary with them enters without asking. The same which is true in regard to the room can be applied to your inner life. Into it everybody intrudes without any necessity, even without any thought, in search of any amusement, and, more often than not, simply to 'scratch his tongue on your soul.' A girl has two every-day dresses, one white and one pink. She puts on the pink one; and here comes a chance for some one to rub tongue over her soul. 'You put on the pink dress, Aniuta; what for?' Aniuta herself does not know why she put it on. It was necessary to put on some kind of a dress; and then, again, if she had put on the white one, it would have amounted to the same thing. So mámenka (or 'sister') says, 'But you would have done better to put on the white one.' But why it would be better, the one who gives the advice does not herself know; she simply rubs her tongue. 'You don't look very happy to-day, Aniuta; what's the matter?' Aniuta is neither happy nor unhappy; however, why shouldn't they ask after what they neither see nor don't see? 'I don't know; there's nothing the matter that I know of.' 'No? you seem to be rather unhappy.' Two minutes pass. 'Aniuta, you had better sit down at the piano and play us a tune'; there is no reason why. And so it goes the whole day. Your soul is like a street, on which everybody who sits at the window is looking, not for the sake of seeing anything in particular,—no, they even know that they will see nothing useful and nothing curious,—but simply because they have nothing else to do. But it's all the same; so, then, why not look? For a street, of course it makes no difference; but people have no pleasure at all from people walking over them.

"Naturally, this imposition, without any aim or idea whatever, must bring a reaction; and as soon as a person places himself in such a situation that he can have seclusion, he for some time finds pleasure in such seclusion, though by nature he may be inclined to sociability and not to seclusion.

"She, in this regard till she was married, was placed in a singularly hard position; they walked on her; they intruded into her very soul, not simply because they had nothing else to do, accidentally, occasionally, and only out of indelicacy, but systematically, without cessation, every minute, too