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The boy, blushing and making no answer, cautiously drew his hand away. As soon as Stepan Arkadyevich let go his hand, he glanced doubtfully at his father, and, like a bird set free, he darted out of the room.

A year had passed since the last time Seriozha had seen his mother.

Since then he had heard nothing more of her. And in the course of that year he had gone to school, and made friends among his schoolfellows. The dreams and memories of his mother, which had made him ill after seeing her, did not occupy his thoughts now. When they came back to him, he studiously drove them away, regarding them as shameful and girlish, below the dignity of a boy and a schoolboy. He knew that his father and mother were separated by some quarrel, he knew that he had to remain with his father, and he tried to get used to that idea.

He disliked seeing his uncle, so like his mother, for it called up those memories which he was ashamed of. He disliked it all the more as, from certain words he had caught as he waited at the study door, and still more from the faces of his father and uncle, he had guessed that they must have been talking of his mother. And to avoid condemning the father with whom he lived and on whom he was dependent, and, above all, to avoid giving way to sentimentality, which he considered so degrading, Seriozha tried not to look at his uncle, who had come to disturb his peace of mind, and not to think of what he recalled to him.

But when Stepan Arkadyevich, going out after him, saw him on the stairs, and, calling to him, asked him how he spent his playtime at school, Seriozha talked more freely to him away from his father's presence.

`We have a railway now,' he said in answer to his uncle's question.

`It's like this, you see: two sit on a bench - they're the passengers;and one stands up straight on the bench. And all are harnessed to it by their arms or by their belts, and they run through all the rooms - the doors are left open beforehand. Well, and it's pretty hard work being the conductor!'

`That's the one that stands?' Stepan Arkadyevich inquired, smiling.

`Yes, you want pluck for it, and cleverness too, especially when they stop all of a sudden, or someone falls down.'

`Yes, that must be a serious matter,' said Stepan Arkadyevich, watching with mournful interest the eager eyes, like his mother's; not childish now - no longer fully innocent. And though he had promised Alexei Alexandrovich not to speak of Anna, he could not restrain himself.

`Do you remember your mother?' he asked suddenly.

`No, I don't,' Seriozha said quickly. He blushed crimson, his eyes drooping. And his uncle could get nothing more out of him.

His Slavic tutor found his pupil on the staircase half an hour later, and for a long while he could not make out whether he was ill-tempered or crying.

`What is it? I expect you hurt yourself when you fell down?' said the tutor. `I told you it was a dangerous game. And we shall have to speak to the director.'

`If I had hurt myself, nobody should have found it out, that's certain.'

`Well, what is it, then?'

`Leave me alone! If I remember, or if I don't remember?... What business is it of his? Why should I remember? Leave me in peace!' he said, addressing not his tutor, but the whole world.

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TOLSTOY: Anna Karenina Part 7, Chapter 20[Previous Chapter] [Table of Contents] Chapter 20 Stepan Arkadyevich, as usual, did not waste his time in Peterburg. In Peterburg, besides business, his sister's divorce, and his coveted appointment, he wanted, as he always did, to freshen himself up, as he said, after the mustiness of Moscow.

In spite of its cafés chantants and its omnibuses, Moscow was yet a stagnant bog. Stepan Arkadyevich always felt it. After living for some time in Moscow, especially in close relations with his family, he was conscious of a depression of spirits. After being a long time in Moscow without a change, he reached a point when he positively began to be worrying himself over his wife's ill-humor and reproaches, over his children's health and education, and the petty details of his official work; even the fact of being in debt worried him. But he had only to go and stay a little while in Peterburg, in the circle in which he moved there, where people lived - really lived - instead of vegetating as in Moscow, and all such ideas vanished and melted away at once, like wax before the fire.

A wife?... Only that day he had been talking to Prince Chechensky.

Prince Chechensky had a wife and family, grown-up children in the Corps of Pages.... And he had another illegitimate family of children also. Though the first family was very fine too, Prince Chechensky felt happier in his second family; and he used to take his eldest son with him to his second family, and told Stepan Arkadyevich that he thought it good for his son, enlarging his ideas. What would have been said to that in Moscow?

Children?... In Peterburg children did not prevent their parents from enjoying life. The children were brought up in schools, and there was no trace of the wild idea that prevailed in Moscow, in Lvov's household, for instance, that all the luxuries of life were for the children, while the parents have nothing but work and anxiety. Here people understood that a man is in duty bound to live for himself, as every man of culture should live.

Official duties?... Official work here was not the stiff, hopeless drudgery that it was in Moscow. Here there was some interest in official life. A chance meeting, a service rendered, a happy phrase, a knack of facetious mimicry, and a man's career might be made in a trice. So it had been with Briantsev, whom Stepan Arkadyevich had met the previous day, and who was one of the highest functionaries in government now. There was some interest in official work like that.

The Peterburg attitude on pecuniary matters had an especially soothing effect on Stepan Arkadyevich. Bartniansky, who must spend at least fifty thousand to judge by the style he lived in, had made a remarkable comment the day before on that subject.