Having seen Arkady off with ironical sympathy, and given him to understand that he was not in the least deceived about the real object of his journey, Bazarov shut himself up in solitude, and set to work with feverish intensity. He no longer argued with Pavel Petrovich, particularly since the latter assumed in his presence an oppressively aristocratic manner and expressed his opinions more by inarticulate sounds than by words. Only on one occasion Pavel Petrovich fell into a controversy with the nihilist over the then much discussed question about the rights of the nobles in the Baltic provinces, but he quickly stopped himself, remarking with a chilly politeness: “However, we cannot understand one another; I, at least, have not the honor of understanding you.”

“I should think not!” exclaimed Bazarov. “A human being can understand everything — how the ether vibrates, and what’s going on in the sun; but how another person can blow his nose differently from him, that he’s incapable of understanding.”

“What, is that a joke?” remarked Pavel Petrovich in a questioning tone and walked away.

However, he sometimes asked permission to be present at Bazarov’s experiments and once even placed his perfumed face, washed with the finest soap, over the microscope, in order to see how a transparent protozoon swallowed a green speck and busily chewed it with two very adroit organs which were in its throat. Nikolai Petrovich visited Bazarov much oftener than his brother; he would have come every day “to learn,” as he expressed it, if the worries of his farm had not kept him too busy. He did not interfere with the young research worker; he used to sit down in a corner of the room and watch attentively, occasionally permitting himself some discreet question. During dinner and supper he used to try to turn the conversation to physics, geology or chemistry, since all other subjects, even agriculture, to say nothing of politics, might lead, if not to collisions, at least to mutual dissatisfaction. Nikolai Petrovich guessed that his brother’s dislike of Bazarov had not diminished. A minor incident, among many others, confirmed his surmise. Cholera began to break out in some places in the neighborhood, and even “carried off” two people from Maryino itself. One night Pavel Petrovich had a rather severe attack of illness. He was in pain till the morning, but he never asked for Bazarov’s help; when he met him the next day, in reply to his question why he had not sent for him, he answered, still very pale, but perfectly brushed and shaved. “Surely I remember you said yourself you don’t believe in medicine.” So the days passed. Bazarov went on working obstinately and grimly . . . and meanwhile there was in Nikolai Petrovich’s house one person to whom, if he did not open his heart, he was at least glad to talk . . . that person was Fenichka.

He used to meet her chiefly in the early morning, in the garden or the farmyard; he never went to see her in her room and she had only once come to his door to inquire — should she give Mitya his bath or not? She not only had confidence in him and was not afraid of him, she felt freer and more at ease with him than she did with Nikolai Petrovich himself. It is hard to say how this came about; perhaps because unconsciously she felt in Bazarov the absence of anything aristocratic, of all that superiority which at once attracts and overawes. In her eyes he was both an excellent doctor and a simple man. She attended to her baby in his presence without any embarrassment, and once when she was suddenly overcome by giddiness and headache she took a spoonful of medicine from his hands. When Nikolai Petrovich was there she kept Bazarov somehow at a distance; she did this not out of hypocrisy but from a definite sense of propriety. Of Pavel Petrovich she was more afraid than ever; for some time he had begun to watch her, and would suddenly appear, as if he had sprung out of the earth behind her back, in his English suit with an impassive vigilant face and with his hands in his pockets.

“It’s like having cold water thrown over one,” said Fenichka to Dunyasha, who sighed in response and thought of another “heartless” man. Bazarov, without the faintest suspicion of the fact, had become the “cruel tyrant” of her heart.

Fenichka liked Bazarov, and he liked her also. His face was even transformed when he talked to her; it took on an open kindly expression, and his habitual nonchalance was modified by a kind of jocular attentiveness. Fenichka was growing prettier every day. There is a period in the life of young women when they suddenly begin to expand and blossom like summer roses; such a time had come for Fenichka. Everything contributed to it, even the June heat which was then at its height. Dressed in a light white dress, she seemed herself whiter and more graceful; the sun had not tanned her skin; but the heat, from which she could not protect herself, spread a slight flush over her cheeks and ears and a gentle languor through her whole body, reflected in the dreamy expression of her charming eyes. She was almost unable to work and kept on sighing and complaining with a comic helplessness.

“You should go oftener to bathe,” Nikolai Petrovich told her. He had arranged a large bathing place covered with an awning in the only one of his ponds which had not yet completely dried up.

“Oh, Nikolai Petrovich! But you die before you get to the pond and on the way back you die again. You see, there’s no shade in the garden.”

“That’s true, there’s no shade,” said Nikolai Petrovich, wiping his forehead.

One day at seven o’clock in the morning, Bazarov was returning from a walk and encountered Fenichka in the lilac arbor, which had long ceased to flower but was still thick with green leaves. She was sitting on the bench and had as usual thrown a white kerchief over her head; beside her lay a whole heap of red and white roses still wet with dew. He said good morning to her.

“Oh, Evgeny Vassilich!” she said and lifted the edge of her kerchief a little in order to look at him, in doing which her arm was bared to the elbow.

“What are you doing here?” said Bazarov, sitting down beside her. “Are you making a bouquet?”

“Yes, for the table at lunch. Nikolai Petrovich likes it.”

“But lunch is still a long way off. What a mass of flowers.”

“I gathered them now, for it will be hot later on and one can’t go out. Even now one can only just breathe. I feel quite weak from the heat. I’m quite afraid I may get ill.”

“What an idea! Let me feel your pulse.”

Bazarov took her hand, felt for the evenly throbbing pulse but did not even start to count its beats.

“You’ll live a hundred years,” he said, dropping her hand.

“Ah, God forbid!” she cried.

“But why? Don’t you want a long life?”

“Well, but a hundred years! We had an old woman of eighty-five near us — and what a marty............