“Maybe a fly,” Marfa would suggest. The fastidious boy never answered, but it was the same with the bread, the meat, every dish: he would hold a piece up to the light on his fork, and study it as if through a microscope, sometimes taking a long time to decide, and, finally, would decide to send it into his mouth. “A fine young sir we’ve got here,” Grigory muttered, looking at him. Fyodor Pavlovich, when he heard about this new quality in Smerdyakov, immediately decided that he should be a cook, and sent him to Moscow for training. He spent a few years in training, and came back much changed in appearance . He suddenly became somehow remarkably old, with wrinkles even quite disproportionate to his age, turned sallow, and began to look like a eunuch. But morally he was almost the same when he returned as he had been before his departure for Moscow, was still just as unsociable, and felt not the slightest need for anyone’s company. In Moscow, too, as was afterwards reported, he was silent all the time; Moscow itself interested him somehow very little, so that he learned only a few things about it and paid no attention to all the rest. He even went to the theater once, but came home silent and displeased. On the other hand, he returned to us from Moscow very well dressed, in a clean frock coat and linen, scrupulously brushed his clothes twice a day without fail, and was terribly fond of waxing his smart calfskin boots with a special English polish so that they shone like mirrors. He turned out to be a superb cook. Fyodor Pavlovich appointed him a salary, and Smerdyakov spent almost the whole of this salary on clothes, pomade, perfume, and so on. Yet he seemed to despise the female sex as much as the male, and behaved solemnly, almost inaccessibly, with it. Fyodor Pavlovich also began glancing at him from a somewhat different point of view. The thing was that the attacks of his falling sickness became more frequent, and on those days Marfa Ignatievna prepared the meals, which did not suit him at all.
“How come you’re having more attacks now?” he sometimes looked askance at the new cook, peering into his face. “I wish you’d marry somebody, do you want me to get you married ... ?”
