her eyebrows with a sort of humorous
severity. Everything about her was still young and undeveloped; the
voice, and the bloom on her whole face, and the rosy hands, with white
palms, and the rather narrow shoulders.... She was constantly blushing
and getting out of breath.

Madame Odintsov turned to Bazarov. 'You are looking at pictures from
politeness, Yevgeny Vassilyitch,' she began. That does not interest
you. You had better come nearer to us, and let us have a discussion
about something.'

Bazarov went closer. 'What subject have you decided upon for
discussion?' he said.

'What you like. I warn you, I am dreadfully argumentative.'

'You?'

'Yes. That seems to surprise you. Why?'

'Because, as far as I can judge, you have a calm, cool character, and
one must be impulsive to be argumentative.'

'How can you have had time to understand me so soon? In the first
place, I am impatient and obstinate--you should ask Katya; and
secondly, I am very easily carried away.'

Bazarov looked at Anna Sergyevna. 'Perhaps; you must know best. And so
you are inclined for a discussion--by all means. I was looking through
the views of the Saxon mountains in your album, and you remarked that
that couldn't interest me. You said so, because you suppose me to have
no feeling for art, and as a fact I haven't any; but these views might
be interesting to me from a geological standpoint, for the formation of
the mountains, for instance.'

'Excuse me; but as a geologist, you would sooner have recourse to a
book, to a special work on the subject, and not to a drawing.'

'The drawing shows me at a glance what would be spread over ten pages
in a book.'

Anna Sergyevna was silent for a little.

'And so you haven't the least artistic feeling?' she observed, putting
her elbow on the table, and by that very action bringing her face
nearer to Bazarov. 'How can you get on without it?'

'Why, what is it wanted for, may I ask?'

'Well, at least to enable one to study and understand men.'

Bazarov smiled. 'In the first place, experience of life does that; and
in the second, I assure you, studying separate individuals is not worth
the trouble. All people are like one another, in soul as in body; each
of us has brain, spleen, heart, and lungs made alike; and the so-called
moral qualities are the same in all; the slight variations are of no
importance. A single human specimen is sufficient to judge of all by.
People are like trees in a fore