being bored, and talked about
independence of mind and those who are in the rut of tradition.
Carried away by her new ideas, Vera Semyonovna proved that the work
that her brother was so engrossed in was conventional, that it was
a vain effort of conservative minds to preserve what had already
served its turn and was vanishing from the scene of action. She
made no end of comparisons. She compared her brother at one time
to an alchemist, then to a musty old Believer who would sooner die
than listen to reason. By degrees there was a perceptible change
in her manner of life, too. She was capable of lying on the sofa
all day long doing nothing but think, while her face wore a cold,
dry expression such as one sees in one-sided people of strong faith.
She began to refuse the attentions of the servants, swept and tidied
her own room, cleaned her own boots and brushed her own clothes.
Her brother could not help looking with irritation and even hatred
at her cold face when she went about her menial work. In that work,
which was always performed with a certain solemnity, he saw something
strained and false, he saw something both pharisaical and affected.
And knowing he could not touch her by persuasion, he carped at her
and teased her like a schoolboy.

"You won't resist evil, but you resist my having servants!" he
taunted her. "If servants are an evil, why do you oppose it? That's
inconsistent!"

He suffered, was indignant and even ashamed. He felt ashamed when
his sister began doing odd things before strangers.

"It's awful, my dear fellow," he said to me in private, waving his
hands in despair. "It seems that our _ingenue_ has remained to play
a part in the farce, too. She's become morbid to the marrow of her
bones! I've washed my hands of her, let her think as she likes; but
why does she talk, why does she excite me? She ought to think what
it means for me to listen to her. What I feel when in my presence
she has the effrontery to support her errors by blasphemously quoting
the teaching of Christ! It chokes me! It makes me hot all over to
hear my sister propounding her doctrines and trying to distort the
Gospel to suit her, when she purposely refrains from mentioning how
the moneychangers were driven out of the Temple. That's, my dear
fellow, what comes of being half educated, undeveloped! That's what
comes of medical studies which provide no general culture!"

One day on coming home from the office, Vladimir Semyonitch