a very cultured and good-natured old man, who was so appalled when
he found a high-school boy with a cigarette in his mouth that he
turned pale, immediately summoned an emergency committee of the
teachers, and sentenced the sinner to expulsion. This was probably
a law of social life: the less an evil was understood, the more
fiercely and coarsely it was attacked.

The prosecutor remembered two or three boys who had been expelled
and their subsequent life, and could not help thinking that very
often the punishment did a great deal more harm than the crime
itself. The living organism has the power of rapidly adapting itself,
growing accustomed and inured to any atmosphere whatever, otherwise
man would be bound to feel at every moment what an irrational basis
there often is underlying his rational activity, and how little of
established truth and certainty there is even in work so responsible
and so terrible in its effects as that of the teacher, of the lawyer,
of the writer. . . .

And such light and discursive thoughts as visit the brain only when
it is weary and resting began straying through Yevgeny Petrovitch's
head; there is no telling whence and why they come, they do not
remain long in the mind, but seem to glide over its surface without
sinking deeply into it. For people who are forced for whole hours,
and even days, to think by routine in one direction, such free
private thinking affords a kind of comfort, an agreeable solace.

It was between eight and nine o'clock in the evening. Overhead, on
the second storey, someone was walking up and down, and on the floor
above that four hands were playing scales. The pacing of the man
overhead who, to judge from his nervous step, was thinking of