form of James.

He was what is called a most good-natured man, but of melancholy
temperament, pottering, and timid, with a bent for everything mysterious
and occult.... A half-whispered ah! was his habitual exclamation; he even
died with this exclamation on his lips, two years after his removal to
Moscow.

His son, Yakov, was in appearance unlike his father, who had been plain,
clumsy, and awkward; he took more after his mother. He had the same
delicate pretty features, the same soft ash-coloured hair, the same little
aquiline nose, the same pouting childish lips, and great greenish-grey
languishing eyes, with soft eyelashes. But in character he was like his
father; and the face, so unlike the father's face, wore the father's
expression; and he had the triangular-shaped hands and hollow chest of the
old Aratov, who ought, however, hardly to be called old, since he never
reached his fiftieth year. Before his death, Yakov had already entered the
university in the faculty of physics and mathematics; he did not, however,
complete his course; not through laziness, but because, according to his
notions, you could learn no more in the university than you could studying
alone at home; and he did not go in for a diploma because he had no idea of
entering the government service. He was shy with his fellow-students, made
friends with scarcely any one, especially held aloof from women, and lived
in great solitude, buried in books. He held aloof from women, though he
had a heart of the tenderest, and was fascinated by beauty.... He had even
obtained a sumptuous English keepsake, and (oh shame!) gloated adoringly
over its 'elegantly engraved' representations of the various ravishing
Gulnaras and Medoras.... But his innate modesty always kept him in check.
In the house he used to work in what had been his father's study, it was
also his bedroom, and his bed was the very one in which his father had