day; Timofeitch in person had galloped off at early dawn for beef; the
bailiff had gone off in another direction for turbot, gremille, and
crayfish; for mushrooms alone forty-two farthings had been paid the
peasant women in copper); but Arina Vlasyevna's eyes, bent steadfastly
on Bazarov, did not express only devotion and tenderness; in them was
to be seen sorrow also, mingled with awe and curiosity; there was to be
seen too a sort of humble reproachfulness.

Bazarov, however, was not in a humour to analyse the exact expression
of his mother's eyes; he seldom turned to her, and then only with some
short question. Once he asked her for her hand 'for luck'; she gently
laid her soft, little hand on his rough, broad palm.

'Well,' she asked, after waiting a little, 'has it been any use?'

'Worse luck than ever,' he answered, with a careless laugh.

'He plays too rashly,' pronounced Father Alexey, as it were
compassionately, and he stroked his beard.

'Napoleon's rule, good Father, Napoleon's rule,' put in Vassily
Ivanovitch, leading an ace.

'It brought him to St. Helena, though,' observed Father Alexey, as he
trumped the ace.

'Wouldn't you like some currant tea, Enyusha?' inquired Arina
Vlasyevna.

Bazarov merely shrugged his shoulders.

'No!' he said to Arkady the next day. I'm off from here to-morrow. I'm
bored; I want to work, but I can't work here. I will come to your place
again; I've left all my apparatus there too. In your house one can at
any rate shut oneself up. While here my father repeats to me, "My study
is at your disposal--nobody shall interfere with you," and all the time
he himself is never a yard away. And I'm ashamed somehow to shut myself
away from him. It's the same thing too with mother. I hear her sighing
the other side of the wall, and if one goes in to her, one's nothing to
say to her.'

'She will be very much grieved,' observed Arkady, 'and so will he.'

'I shall come back again to them.'

'When?'

'Why, when on my way to Petersburg.'

'I feel sorry for your mother particularly.'

'Why's that? Has she won your heart with strawberries, or what?'

Arkady dropped his eyes. 'You don't understand your mother, Yevgeny.
She's not only a very good woman, she's very clever really. This
morning she talked to me for half-an-hour, and so sensibly,
interestingly.'

'I suppose she was expatiating upon me all the while?'

'We didn't talk only about you.'

'Perhaps; lookers-on see most.