"No, I am only preparing for the Conservatoire, and till now have
been working with Madame Zavlovsky."

"Have you finished at the high school here?"

"Oh, no," Vera Iosifovna answered for her, "We have teachers for
her at home; there might be bad influences at the high school or a
boarding school, you know. While a young girl is growing up, she
ought to be under no influence but her mother's."

"All the same, I'm going to the Conservatoire," said Ekaterina
Ivanovna.

"No. Kitten loves her mamma. Kitten won't grieve papa and mamma."

"No, I'm going, I'm going," said Ekaterina Ivanovna, with playful
caprice and stamping her foot.

And at supper it was Ivan Petrovitch who displayed his talents.
Laughing only with his eyes, he told anecdotes, made epigrams, asked
ridiculous riddles and answered them himself, talking the whole
time in his extraordinary language, evolved in the course of prolonged
practice in witticism and evidently now become a habit: "Badsome,"
"Hugeous," "Thank you most dumbly," and so on.

But that was not all. When the guests, replete and satisfied, trooped
into the hall, looking for their coats and sticks, there bustled
about them the footman Pavlusha, or, as he was called in the family,
Pava--a lad of fourteen with shaven head and chubby cheeks.