ectable disguise; and he was to come home by the caravan route
laden with costliest treasures. Again it was all his wish to be another
Nimrod: Indian tigers, American buffaloes, African elephants were to go
down in thousands before his imaginary gun. While once more (this when
his every spare moment was divided between _Peter the Great_ and the
_Arabian Nights_), he saw himself, at the head of a Cossack army,
storming Constantinople and carrying away the most beautiful Princess
ever enslaved in royal harem. And while the boy silently performed these
great deeds, he was also engaged upon a few simpler, but more salutary
physical feats in a neighboring gymnasium, whence he emerged with
muscles fairly well-developed, and a hand and eye unusually quick at the
foils.

His days were kept wisely full. At that time it was the custom to cram
children rather unmercifully. But Sophia and Ludmillo together made
saner disposal of Ivan's hours. He was made to know thoroughly what he
knew. And it was their great effort to keep him busy enough to prevent a
real appreciation of his isolated life. Their plans were made skilfully
and carried out to the letter. Wherefore the fact that their end was not
actually accomplished, could be charged only to the merciless quickness
of the boy's own apperceptions.

How early it was that he learned the difference between himself and
others, it would be nearly impossible to say. His mother, indeed, was
probably spared the discovery of his knowledge. For he was reserved
beyond his years, and a violent secret pride was his one unsuspected
Gregoriev trait. However it happened, Ivan learned, as a very little
boy, that only in his life was no provision ever made for visits to and
from others of his kind. He knew that he had been left out of the lives
of his class: that the young Mirskies, Blashkovs, Kropotkins, Osinin,
visiting almost daily among themselves, never came to, never asked for,
him. He even divined the one or two half-hearted attempts on his
mother's part to obtain for him at least the occasional companionship of
her own nephews and second-cousins. But what it was that hurt him so
unconscionably about this knowledge he did not realize until after he
had come into manhood. It was doubtful if even his mother, suffering for
him, had a greater sense of unhappiness than he, in his blind sense of
injustice somewhere. For to Sophia, ostracism had long since become a
kind of second nature. But for her