any member of the family except Papa or (occasionally)
myself. Involuntarily I offended against his view of girls, seeing that
I was not so afraid of seeming affectionate as he, and, moreover, had
not such a profound and confirmed contempt for young women. Yet several
times that summer, when driven by lack of amusement to try and engage
Lubotshka and Katenka in conversation, I always encountered in them such
an absence of any capacity for logical thinking, and such an ignorance
of the simplest, most ordinary matters (as, for instance, the nature of
money, the subjects studied at universities, the effect of war, and so
forth), as well as such indifference to my explanations of such matters,
that these attempts of mine only ended in confirming my unfavourable
opinion of feminine ability.

I remember one evening when Lubotshka kept repeating some unbearably
tedious passage on the piano about a hundred times in succession, while
Woloda, who was dozing on a settee in the drawing-room, kept addressing
no one in particular as he muttered, "Lord! how she murders it! WHAT a
musician! WHAT a Beethoven!" (he always pronounced the composer's name
with especial irony). "Wrong again! Now--a second time! That's it!"
and so on. Meanwhile Katenka and I were sitting by the tea-table, and
somehow she began to talk about her favourite subject--love. I was in
the right frame of mind to philosophise, and began by loftily defining
love as the wish to acquire in another what one does not possess in
oneself. To this Katenka retorted that, on the contrary, love is not
love at all if a girl desires to marry a man for his money alone, but
that, in her opinion, riches were a vain thing, and true love only the
affection which can stand the test of separation (this I took to be a
hint concerning her love for Dubkoff). At this point Woloda, who must
have been listening all the time, raised himself on his elbow, and cried
out some rubbish or another; and I felt that he was right.

Apart from the general faculties (more or less developed in different
persons) of intellect, sensibility, and artistic feeling, there also
exists (more or less developed in different circles of society, and
especially in families) a private or individual faculty which I may
call APPREHENSION. The essence of this faculty lies in sympathetic
appreciation of proportion, and in identical understanding of things.
Two individuals who possess this faculty and belong to the same soc