not revolting, of bearing a blow from any one whatever . . . even the dearest hand! But it seems one can, if one loves.. . . While I . . . I imagined . . .'
I had grown much older during the last month; and my love, with all its transports and sufferings, struck me myself as something small and childish and pitiful beside this other unimagined something, which I could hardly fully grasp, and which frightened me like an unknown, beautiful, but menacing face, which one strives in vain to make out clearly in the half-darkness.. . .
A strange and fearful dream came to me that same night. I dreamed I went into a low dark room.. . . My father was standing with a whip in his hand, stamping with anger; in the corner crouched Zinaïda, and not on her arm, but on her forehead, was a stripe of red . . . while behind them both towered Byelovzorov, covered with blood; he opened his white lips, and wrathfully threatened my father.
Two months later, I entered the university; and within six months my father died of a stroke in Petersburg, where he had just moved with my mother and me. A few days before his death he received a letter from Moscow which threw him into a violent agitation.. . . He went to my mother to beg some favour of
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