Seryozha might have struck a grown-up person as abnormal. He thought
it possible and reasonable to draw men taller than houses, and to
represent in pencil, not only objects, but even his sensations.
Thus he would depict the sounds of an orchestra in the form of smoke
like spherical blurs, a whistle in the form of a spiral thread. . . .
To his mind sound was closely connected with form and colour,
so that when he painted letters he invariably painted the letter L
yellow, M red, A black, and so on.

Abandoning his drawing, Seryozha shifted about once more, got into
a comfortable attitude, and busied himself with his father's beard.
First he carefully smoothed it, then he parted it and began combing
it into the shape of whiskers.

"Now you are like Ivan Stepanovitch," he said, "and in a minute you
will be like our porter. Papa, why is it porters stand by doors?
Is it to prevent thieves getting in?"

The prosecutor felt the child's breathing on his face, he was
continually touching his hair with his cheek, and there was a warm
soft feeling in his soul, as soft as though not only his hands but
his whole soul were lying on the velvet of Seryozha's jacket.

He looked at the boy's big dark eyes, and it seemed to him as though
from those wide pupils there looked out at him his mother and his
wife and everything that he had ever loved.

"To think of thrashing him . . ." he mused. "A nice task to devise
a punishment for him! How can we undertake to bring up the young?
In old days people were simpler and thought less, and so settled