Moscow. But this was a matter to be so much taken for granted
that it brought little additional pride. Ivan's imaginary father had
long been invested with greater honors than these. He would much have
preferred a satisfactory explanation of the one point which troubled
him mightily: which had filled many of his nights with unsuspected
grief, and disturbed his day-dreams while he puzzled, anxiously, over
known facts that had become too inconsistent with his beliefs for
comfort. That scene enacted in his mother's rooms, at supper, on the
evening after the ill-starred ball, when, at his mother's bidding, he
had left her, knowing that she wished to keep him from questions that
must not be asked, was neither the first such affair that he had seen,
nor yet the tenth. He had left the room with hands clinched and his
heart burning with anger: anger against--whom? what? The person who
brought the look he could not bear into his mother's eyes; the thing
that reopened those never-healed wounds he knew she bore within her. And
these wounds?--the suffering in her look?--Well, he knew, well enough,
of course, that they had all been made by his father! But the father of
such deeds was not the embodiment of romance that he had created out of
the stuff of dreams! There was, then, another; a reality: terrible,
perhaps, but also despicable, and full of things so mean, so low, that
he was hardly even to be hated? Already he could feel that hate was a
strong passion, not unflattering to its object. But--a man who
ill-treated women:--Incredible!

This was Ivan's immediate tangle. And, mercifully, tangle it remained
for many years. Only by degrees so gradual that they hardly hurt, did he
begin at last to draw away from the ideal, and accept, with whatever
reluctance, the real. At the very end, the struggle may have been sharp.
But this was simply because the idealized being himself seized and tore
away his last shred of illusion, and stood, bare-souled, before the son
who could only sit and gaze in horrified, horrible judgment.

* * * * *

It happened in this wise.

Through the years of his son's infancy and boyhood Michael Gregoriev,
disregarding all thought of his child, saw practically nothing of the
boy. He had, in his heart, some faint satisfaction concerning Ivan's
sex, mingled with a fancy, gained after one accidental interview, that
nevertheless, considering his tastes and traits, Sophia's child shoul