"And you, Alekséi Petróvitch, have a desire to amuse yourself with hog-Latin and syllogisms," says her mílenki; that is, her husband.
Viéra Pavlovna here seemed to join them and say, "Now do stop talking about your analyses, identities, and anthropologisms. Please talk about something, gentlemen, so that I may take part in your conversation; or rather, let us play."
"Yes, let us play," said Alekséi Petróvitch. "Let us play 'Confession.'"
"Came on! come on! It'll be very gay," says Viéra Pavlovna. "You suggested the game; now you must show us how to do it."
"With pleasure, my sister," says Alekséi Petróvitch. "But how old are you, my dear sister? eighteen?"
"I shall soon be nineteen."
"But you are not yet; therefore, let us suppose that you are eighteen, and we will all confess what we did till we were eighteen, because we must have an equality of conditions. I will confess for myself and my wife. My father was a diakon in a governmental town, and then he took up the business of book-binding; and my mother took seminarists to board. From morning till night my father and mother were always worrying and talking about how to live. Father used to drink, but only at times when intolerable want stared him in the face—that was real grief; or, when his income was pretty good, he used to give my mother all he had, and say, 'Well, mátushka, now thank God, you will not suffer want for two months to come; but I have left half a ruble in my pocket, and I shall take a drink for very joy'—that was a real joy. My mother used to get vexed very often. Sometimes she used to beat me, but only when she had a pain in the small of the back, as she herself used to say, from lifting the boiler and kettles, from washing all the clothes of five of us besides five seminarists, and from washing the floors dirtied by our twenty feet which did not wear galoshes, and from taking care of the cow. It is a real strain upon the nerves to bear too much labor without rest. And for all that, the ends did not used to meet, as she expressed it; that is, she was short of money for getting boots for some one of us brothers, or shoes for the sisters. Then she used to beat us. She used to pet us too, when we, stupid little children that we were, expressed a desire to help her in her work, or whenever we
