and fines and arrears of all sorts had mounted up to more
than two thousand.

"To my mind there can be no doubt," Rashevitch went on, growing
more and more enthusiastic, "that if a Richard Coeur-de-Lion, or
Frederick Barbarossa, for instance, is brave and noble those qualities
will pass by heredity to his son, together with the convolutions
and bumps of the brain, and if that courage and nobility of soul
are preserved in the son by means of education and exercise, and
if he marries a princess who is also noble and brave, those qualities
will be transmitted to his grandson, and so on, until they become
a generic characteristic and pass organically into the flesh and
blood. Thanks to a strict sexual selection, to the fact that high-born
families have instinctively guarded themselves against marriage
with their inferiors, and young men of high rank have not married
just anybody, lofty, spiritual qualities have been transmitted from
generation to generation in their full purity, have been preserved,
and as time goes on have, through exercise, become more exalted and
lofty. For the fact that there is good in humanity we are indebted
to nature, to the normal, natural, consistent order of things, which
has throughout the ages scrupulously segregated blue blood from
plebeian. Yes, my dear boy, no low lout, no cook's son has given
us literature, science, art, law, conceptions of honour and duty
. . . . For all these things mankind is indebted exclusively to the
aristocracy, and from that point of view, the point of view of
natural history, an inferior Sobakevitch by the very fact of his
blue blood is superior and more useful than the very best merchant,
even though the latter may have built fifteen museums. Say what you
like! And when I refuse to shake hands with a low lout or a cook's
son, or to let him sit down to table with me, by that very act I
am safeguarding what is the best thing on earth, and am carrying
out one of Mother Nature's finest designs for leading us up to
perfection. . ."

Rashevitch stood still, combing his beard with both hands; his
shadow, too, stood still on the wall, looking like a pair of scissors.

"Take Mother-Russia now," he went on, thrusting his hands in his
pockets and standing first on his heels and then on his toes. "Who
are her best people? Take our first-rate painters, writers, composers
. . . . Who are they? They were all of aristocratic origin. Pushkin,
Lermontov, Turgenev, Gontcharov,