Page:The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (volume IV).djvu/266

 shut oneself up. While here my father repeats to me, "My study is at your disposal—nobody shall interfere with you," and all the time he himself is never a yard away. And I'm ashamed somehow to shut myself away from him. It's the same thing too with mother. I hear her sighing the other side of the wall, and if one goes in to her, one's nothing to say to her.'

'She will be very much grieved,' observed Arkady, 'and so will he.'

'I shall come back again to them.'

'When?'

'Why, when on my way to Petersburg.'

'I feel sorry for your mother particularly.'

'Why's that? Has she won your heart with strawberries, or what?'

Arkady dropped his eyes. 'You don't understand your mother, Yevgeny. She's not only a very good woman, she's very clever really. This morning she talked to me for half-an-hour, and so sensibly, interestingly.'

'I suppose she was expatiating upon me all the while?'

'We didn't talk only about you.'

'Perhaps; lookers-on see most. If a woman can keep up half-an-hour's conversation, it's always a hopeful sign. But I'm going, all the same.'

'It won't be very easy for you to break it