t I should behold from nearby a magnificent
monolith. Meanwhile it was stuck over with labels of various
kinds of trash, and covered with half a hundred stains of the
past--"

"He remembered the school of training and labor in time," laughed
Kranitski.

"Peste!" hissed the baron. "What a rheumatism of thought!"

"Moral principles!" added Kranitski, "he himself practises them
beautifully. Let him give even half of his millions to that
poverty which is ashamed to beg. Oh, he will not! He will not do
that! By the help of moral principles it is easy to put sacred
burdens on other men's shoulders."

"That is it," added Maryan, "on other men's shoulders you have
hit the point, my old man. Yes! So many years he cared for
nothing; he considered nothing; now on a sudden he has thrown
down the edifice which he himself built. I know not as to others;
but, as for me, I shall stick to my rights. I cannot permit
myself to fall a victim to this sad accident, that my father is a
mental rheumatic."

He stopped, meditated a moment, then added:

"That is even more than rheumatism of thought; it is the
exudation of a decaying past, filling the brain with the
corruption--of a corpse."

"Corruption of a corpse! very apt this expression!" exclaimed the
baron.

Kranitski made a wry face in the cathedra, and muttered:

"No, no. What horror! I will never agree to that phrase."

But no one heard this quiet protest. Now the baron in his turn,
walking more and more quickly through the room, spoke on.

Maryan remained sitting on the Louis XI box while the baron
walked and complained of the narrowness of relations and the low
level of civilization in the city:

"This is the real fatherland of darned socks. Everything here has
the mustiness of locked up store-houses. There is a lack of room
and ventilation. In England William Morris, a great poet,
establishes a factory for objects pertaining to art, and makes
millions. I beg you to show anything similar in this place.
Darvid has made a colossal fortune only because he was not blind,
and did not hold on to his father's fence. Nationality and
fa-ther-land, each is a darned sock--one of those labels which
men with parti-colored clothes paste on a gate before which
diggers are standing. One must escape from this position. One
must know how to will."

The baron said, that as soon as he could bring certain plans of
his to completion and regulate certain property interests, and
even befo