ONE Sunday afternoon, Yakov Tarasovich Mayakin was drinking tea in his garden and talking to his daughter.

The collar of his shirt unbuttoned, a towel wound round his neck, he sat on a bench under a canopy of verdant cherry-trees, waved his hands in the air, wiped the perspiration off his face, and incessantly poured forth into the air his brisk speech.
"The man who permits his belly to have the upper hand over him is a fool and a rogue! Is there nothing better in the world than eating and drinking?
Upon what will you pride yourself before people, if you are like a hog ?" The old man's eyes sparkled irritably and angrily, his lips twisted with contempt, and the wrinkles of his gloomy face quivered.
"If Foma were my own son, I would have made a man of him!" Playing with an acacia branch, Lubov mutely listened to her father's words, now and then casting a close and searching look in his agitated, quivering face.

Growing older, she changed, without noticing it, her suspicious and cold relation toward the old man.

In his words she now began to find the same ideas that were in her books, and this won her over on her father's side, involuntarily causing the girl to prefer his live words to the cold letters of the book.

Always overwhelmed with business affairs, always alert and clever, he went his own way alone, and she perceived his solitude, knew how painful it was, and her relations toward her father grew in warmth.