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RECOLLECTIONS OF CHILDHOOD 99
began to dress simply in black gowns, with plain
collars, and to comb her hair straight back into a net.
She now spoke of balls and entertainments with scorn.
In the mornings she collected the children of the
house servants and taught them to read, and when
she met the village women during her rambles, she
stopped them, and held long conversations with them.
But the most noticeable thing was that Aniuta,
who had hitherto hated study, now evinced a passion
for it. Instead of, as hitherto, wasting all her
pocket-money on toilettes and fripperies, she now ordered
whole boxes of books from town; and not romances,
either, but books with such wise titles as " The
Physiology of Life," " The History of Civilization," and
so forth.
One day Aniuta came to my father, and made
a sudden and utterly unexpected demand — that he
should allow her to go to Petersburg to study. At
first father tried to turn her request into a jest, as
he had done before, when Aniuta had announced that
she would not live in the country. But this time
Aniuta did not desist. Neither father’s jests nor his
witticisms had any effect on her. She hotly
demonstrated that it did not follow, because father was
obliged to live on the estate, that she must shut
herself up in the country also, where she had neither
occupations nor pleasures.
Father got angry at last, and shouted at her as if
she had been a small child. "If you don’t
understand that it is the duty of every respectable girl to
live with her parents until she marries, I won’t argue
with a stupid, bad little girl!" he said.
Auiuta comprehended that it was useless to insist.
But from that day forth the relations between her
and father were very strained; each exhibited
irritation against each other, and this irritation increased
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