This ending struck Yevgeny Petrovitch as absurd and naïve, but the whole story made an intense impression on Seryozha. Again his eyes were clouded by mournfulness and something like fear; for a minute he looked pensively at the dark window, shuddered, and said, in a sinking voice:

“I am not going to smoke any more.…”

When he had said good-night and gone away his father walked up and down the room and smiled to himself.

“They would tell me it was the influence of beauty, artistic form,” he meditated. “It may be so but that’s no comfort. It’s not the right way, all the same.…Why must morality and truth never be offered in their crude form, but only with embellishments, sweetened and gilded like pills? It’s not normal.…It’s falsification…deception…tricks.…”

He thought of the jurymen to whom it was absolutely necessary to make a “speech,” of the general public who absorb history only from legends and historical novels, and of himself and how he had gathered an understanding of life not from sermons and laws, but from fables, novels, poems.

“Medicine should be sweet, truth beautiful, and man has had this foolish habit since the days of Adam…though, indeed, perhaps it is all natural, and ought to be so.…There are many deceptions and delusions in nature that serve a purpose.”

He set to work, but lazy, intimate thoughts still strayed through his mind for a good while. Overhead the scales could no longer be heard, but the inhabitant of the second storey was still pacing from one end of the room to another.