usion; she was of a soft but fairly cheerful disposition.
She was about eighteen at the time of her husband's death; she had been
married only a year and had just borne him a son. From the day of his
death she had devoted herself heart and soul to the bringing up of her
precious treasure, her boy Kolya. Though she had loved him passionately
those fourteen years, he had caused her far more suffering than happiness.
She had been trembling and fainting with terror almost every day, afraid
he would fall ill, would catch cold, do something naughty, climb on a
chair and fall off it, and so on and so on. When Kolya began going to
school, the mother devoted herself to studying all the sciences with him
so as to help him, and go through his lessons with him. She hastened to
make the acquaintance of the teachers and their wives, even made up to
Kolya's schoolfellows, and fawned upon them in the hope of thus saving
Kolya from being teased, laughed at, or beaten by them. She went so far
that the boys actually began to mock at him on her account and taunt him
with being a "mother's darling."

But the boy could take his own part. He was a resolute boy, "tremendously
strong," as was rumored in his class, and soon proved to be the fact; he
was agile, strong-willed, and of an audacious and enterprising temper. He
was good at lessons, and there was a rumor in the school that he could
beat the teacher, Dardanelov, at arithmetic and universal history. Though
he looked down upon every one, he was a good comrade and not supercilious.
He accepted his schoolfellows' respect as his due, but was friendly with
them. Above all, he knew where to draw the line. He could restrain himself
on occasion, and in his relations with the teachers he never overstepped
that last mystic limit beyond which a prank becomes an unpardonable breach
of discipline. But he was as fond of mischief on every possible occasion
as the smallest boy in the school, and not so much for the sake of
mischief as for creating a sensation, inventing something, something
effective and conspicuous. He was extremely vain. He knew how to make even
his mother give way to him; he was almost despotic in his control of her.
She gave way to him, oh, she had given way to him for years. The one
thought unendurable to her was that her boy had no great love for her. She
was always fancying that Kolya was "unfeeling" to her, and at times,
dissolving into hysterical tears, she used to reproach him w