oking. When I began to expostulate with him, he put
his fingers in his ears as usual, and sang loudly to drown my voice."

Yevgeny Petrovitch Bykovsky, the prosecutor of the circuit court,
who had just come back from a session and was taking off his gloves
in his study, looked at the governess as she made her report, and
laughed.

"Seryozha smoking . . ." he said, shrugging his shoulders. "I can
picture the little cherub with a cigarette in his mouth! Why, how
old is he?"

"Seven. You think it is not important, but at his age smoking is a
bad and pernicious habit, and bad habits ought to be eradicated in
the beginning."

"Perfectly true. And where does he get the tobacco?"

"He takes it from the drawer in your table."

"Yes? In that case, send him to me."

When the governess had gone out, Bykovsky sat down in an arm-chair
before his writing-table, shut his eyes, and fell to thinking. He
pictured his Seryozha with a huge cigar, a yard long, in the midst
of clouds of tobacco smoke, and this caricature made him smile; at
the same time, the grave, troubled face of the governess called up
memories of the long past, half-forgotten time when smoking aroused
in his teachers and parents a strange, not quite intelligible horror.
It really was horror. Children were mercilessly flogged and expelled
from school, and their lives were made a misery on account of
smoking, though not a single teacher or father knew exactly what
was the harm or sinfulness of smoking. Even very intelligent people
did not scruple to wage war on a vice which they did not understand.
Yevgeny Petrovitch remembered the head-master of the high school,
a very cultured and good-natured old man, who was so appalled when
he found a high-school boy with a cigarette in his mouth that he
turned pale, immediately summoned an emergency committee of the
teachers, and sentenced the sinner to expulsion. This was probably
a law of social life: the less an evil was understood, the more
fiercely and coarsely it was attacked.

The prosecutor remembered two or three boys who had been expelled
and their subsequent life, and could not help thinking that very
often the punishment did a great deal more harm than the crime
itself. The living organism has the power of rapidly adapting itself,
growing accustomed and inured to any atmosphere whatever, otherwise
man would be bound to feel at every moment what an irrational basis
there often is underlying his rational activity