Page:More Tales from Tolstoi.djvu/25

Rh the fox who made believe that the grapes were sour, I affected to despise all the gratifications attainable by an agreeable exterior, and tried with all the strength of my mind and imagination to find delight in a haughty isolation.” The unsatisfying futility of the butterfly-life he led filled him with a savage impatience. He could quite understand, he tells us, the commission of the greatest crimes, not from any desire to injure but from sheer curiosity to see what would happen, from the sheer necessity of doing something. “There are moments,” he says, “when the future presents itself to our mind’s eye in such dark colours that we fear to face it with the eye of reason, and try to persuade ourselves that there will be no Future and that there has been no Past. At such moments I can well understand a youth lighting a fire beneath the very house where his parents, his brothers and sisters, whom he tenderly loves, are sleeping, aye, and doing it without the least fear or hesitation and even with a smile upon his face.” He was firmly convinced at this time that everyone, from his grandmother to his coachman, hated him and delighted in his sufferings, and he took a melancholy pleasure in reflecting that this was to be his destined fate. Yet at this very time he was being petted and féted by all his acquaintances, and allowed to have his own way in everything. The house of his Aunt Yushkovaya was the most aristocratic in Kazan, and young Tolstoi took care to frequent none but the best company, absolutely ignoring the existence of his poorer brethren in grey homespun. His habitual pose was truculent and defiant, his face contemptuous,