th? Very well. He was born in T----, and was the son of a poor
landowner, who died soon after. He was left alone with his mother. She
was a very good woman, and she idolised him; she lived on nothing but
oatmeal, and every penny she had she spent on him. He was educated in
Moscow, first at the expense of some uncle, and afterwards, when he was
grown up and fully fledged, at the expense of a rich prince whose favour
he had courted--there, I beg your pardon, I won't do it again--with whom
he had made friends. Then he went to the university. At the university
I got to know him and we became intimate friends. I will tell you
about our life in those days some other time, I can't now. Then he went
abroad....'

Lezhnyov continued to walk up and down the room; Alexandra Pavlovna
followed him with her eyes.

'While he was abroad,' he continued, 'Rudin wrote very rarely to his
mother, and paid her altogether only one visit for ten days.... The old
lady died without him, cared for by strangers; but up to her death
she never took her eyes off his portrait. I went to see her when I was
staying in T----. She was a kind and hospitable woman; she always used
to feast me on cherry jam. She loved her Mitya devotedly. People of the
Petchorin type tell us that we always love those who are least capable
of feeling love themselves; but it's my idea that all mothers love their
children especially when they are absent. Afterwards I met Rudin
abroad. Then he was connected with a lady, one of our countrywomen, a
bluestocking, no longer young, and plain, as a bluestocking is bound to
be. He lived a good while with her, and at last threw her over--or no, I
beg pardon,--she threw him over. It was then that I too threw him over.
That's all.'

Lezhnyov ceased speaking, passed his hand over his brow, and dropped
into a chair as if he were exhausted.

'Do you know, Mihailo Mihailitch,' began Alexandra Pavlovna, 'you are
a spiteful person, I see; indeed you are no better than Pigasov. I am
convinced that all you have told me is true, that you have not made up
anything, and yet in what an unfavourable light you have put it all! The
poor old mother, her devotion, her solitary death, and that lady--What
does it all amount to? You know that it's easy to put the life of the
best of men in such colours--and without adding anything, observe--that
every one would be shocked! But that too is slander of a kind!'

Lezhnyov got up and again walked about the ro