ces, long since familiar to the room.
As the sound increased, and the laughter began to be punctuated by
clangs of shivering glass, the woman and the boy drew closer together,
and began a hasty conversation, each trying to draw the attention of the
other away from that which occupied them both irresistibly. It was long
before there arrived any diminution in the unholy racket. But at last,
by some fortunate caprice, the party evidently decided to leave the
house for some place of public amusement; so that, at last, the great
palace was wrapped in its wonted, daytime stillness. And in the first
minutes of this, Ivan, as if he read his mother's thoughts, grew silent,
and turned to her expectantly.

His hope was fulfilled. That night, acting impulsively upon a
half-considered plan, Sophia, for the first and last time in her life,
laid bare her heart before her son. The boy listened in a silence that
grew by degrees from reverent interest to pity, from pity to horror,
from horror to absolute fury, till, thinking of the Gregoriev blood that
ran in his veins, he longed to tear from his breast the heart which had
been made to beat by the man below--that father whom he now saw in the
full light of truth. It was in that hour that Ivan put away from him
forever all childish things. His mother's story, so direfully heightened
by reason of all which she left to the intuition and imagination of her
listener, suddenly brought him to an understanding of true womanhood
that is the portion of very few experienced men. It seemed as if his
existence had been enveloped in all that was foul, and wicked, and
heart-breakingly pathetic in the world. And afterwards he realized that
in that evening was sown in him a seed which was to bear bitter fruit:
the seed of the Russian Tosca, that _Herzeleide_, which has stamped
every one of the company of illustrious Slavs with an indelible print of
melancholy.

Sophia probably did not realize Ivan's capacity for feeling or for pity.
Yet she had a purpose in the telling of her story. Ivan, a Gregoriev,
must be given the opportunity of knowing how a woman's soul can be
killed within her. Then, should he follow the footsteps of his race, his
sin would be upon his own head. Nevertheless, she used little art in her
tale, and she drew therefrom neither moral nor homily. Of what use
either of these? What remonstrance was there that could hold a true
Gregoriev from the pursuits of his maturity? At the same time