“Just wait a while, my boy!” said she; “don’t be too certain of your triumph.” And she sat down heavily, in the arm-chair pushed forward by the prince.
“The necessity of eating and drinking, that is to say, solely the instinct of self-preservation...”
“Well, what conclusion have you reached?”

“He entered, and shut the door behind him. Then he silently gazed at me and went quickly to the corner of the room where the lamp was burning and sat down underneath it.

Poor General Epanchin “put his foot in it” by answering the above questions in his own way. He said there was no cryptic message at all. As for the hedgehog, it was just a hedgehog, which meant nothing--unless, indeed, it was a pledge of friendship,--the sign of forgetting of offences and so on. At all events, it was a joke, and, of course, a most pardonable and innocent one.

“Yes, and then he’ll go about the place and disgrace us as he did yesterday.”

“Is it jolly there?”
“Whom else?” said Lebedeff, softly, gazing intently into the prince s face.
“That is all he thinks of!” cried Lizabetha Prokofievna.
“How--what do you mean you didn’t allow?”

“I assure you of it,” laughed Ivan Petrovitch, gazing amusedly at the prince.

“How stupid of me to speak of the portrait,” thought the prince as he entered the study, with a feeling of guilt at his heart, “and yet, perhaps I was right after all.” He had an idea, unformed as yet, but a strange idea.
To all this her mother replied that Alexandra was a freethinker, and that all this was due to that “cursed woman’s rights question.”
“Is not that enough? The instinct of self-preservation is the normal law of humanity...”

Here Colia handed him a chair, and he subsided into it, breathless with rage.

There were sounds of half-smothered laughter at this.
“What is it then, for goodness’ sake?”
But in spite of this conclusion to the episode, the prince remained as puzzled as ever, if not more so. He awaited next morning’s interview with the general most impatiently.
“Yes!”

“What? At your house?” she asked, but without much surprise. “He was alive yesterday evening, wasn’t he? How could you sleep here after that?” she cried, growing suddenly animated.

He did not dare look at her, but he was conscious, to the very tips of his fingers, that she was gazing at him, perhaps angrily; and that she had probably flushed up with a look of fiery indignation in her black eyes.

“You know yourself it does not depend on me.”

“In my opinion, Mr. Doktorenko,” said the prince, in rather a low voice, “you are quite right in at least half of what you say. I would go further and say that you are altogether right, and that I quite agree with you, if there were not something lacking in your speech. I cannot undertake to say precisely what it is, but you have certainly omitted something, and you cannot be quite just while there is something lacking. But let us put that aside and return to the point. Tell me what induced you to publish this article. Every word of it is a calumny, and I think, gentlemen, that you have been guilty of a mean action.”
“I’ll bring it you directly. We only have a cook and one maid, so I have to help as much as I can. Varia looks after things, generally, and loses her temper over it. Gania says you have only just arrived from Switzerland?”

“In connection with ‘the ten,’ eh?” laughed Evgenie, as he left the room.

“Of railways?” put in Colia eagerly.

“Oh, that’s not in _my_ province! I believe she receives at any time; it depends upon the visitors. The dressmaker goes in at eleven. Gavrila Ardalionovitch is allowed much earlier than other people, too; he is even admitted to early lunch now and then.”

“What a dear little thing she is,” thought the prince, and immediately forgot all about her. “No, that was another commentator, whom the papers named. He is dead, however, and I have taken his place,” said the other, much delighted.
“Keller told me (I found him at your place) that you were in the park. ‘Of course he is!’ I thought.”
“Well, in a couple of days I was known all over the palace and the Kremlin as ‘le petit boyard.’ I only went home to sleep. They were nearly out of their minds about me at home. A couple of days after this, Napoleon’s page, De Bazancour, died; he had not been able to stand the trials of the campaign. Napoleon remembered me; I was taken away without explanation; the dead page’s uniform was tried on me, and when I was taken before the emperor, dressed in it, he nodded his head to me, and I was told that I was appointed to the vacant post of page.
“Oh! but that’s all I have,” said the prince, taking it.
So the Epanchins prepared to depart for the summer. “‘Child,’ he said, abruptly. ‘If I were to recognize the Russian orthodox religion and emancipate the serfs, do you think Russia would come over to me?’”
“Gentlemen, gentlemen, let me speak at last,” cried the prince, anxious and agitated. “Please let us understand one another. I say nothing about the article, gentlemen, except that every word is false; I say this because you know it as well as I do. It is shameful. I should be surprised if any one of you could have written it.”
This idea amused the prince.
“Oh, don’t be so worried on my account, prince! I assure you I am not worth it! At least, not I alone. But I see you are suffering on behalf of the criminal too, for wretched Ferdishenko, in fact!”
“God forbid that he should share your ideas, Ivan Fedorovitch!” his wife flashed back. “Or that he should be as gross and churlish as you!”
The actress was a kind-hearted woman, and highly impressionable. She was very angry now.