Page:The Bet and Other Stories.djvu/80

68 During patience the younger generation also comes in for it.

"Our public is degenerate nowadays," Mikhail Fiodorovich sighs. "I don't speak of ideals and such things, I only ask that they should be able to work and think decently. 'Sadly I look at the men of our time'—it's quite true in this connection."

"Yes, they're frightfully degenerate," Katy agrees. "Tell me, had you one single eminent person under you during the last five or ten years?"

"I don't know how it is with the other professors,—but somehow I don't recollect that it ever happened to me."

"In my lifetime I've seen a great many of your students and young scholars, a great many actors. . . . What happened? I never once had the luck to meet, not a hero or a man of talent, but an ordinarily interesting person. Everything's dull and incapable, swollen and pretentious. . . ."

All these conversations about degeneracy give me always the impression that I have unwittingly overheard an unpleasant conversation about my daughter. I feel offended because the indictments are made wholesale and are based upon such ancient hackneyed commonplaces and such penny-dreadful notions as degeneracy, lack of ideals, or comparisons with the glorious past. Any indictment, even if it's made in a company of ladies, should be formulated with