f the party of convicts to which Maslova belonged was
set for the fifth of July, and Nekhludoff was prepared to follow her
on that day. The day before his departure his sister, with her
husband, arrived in town to see him.

Nekhludoff's sister, Natalie Ivanovna Ragojhinsky, was ten years his
senior. He had grown up partly under her influence. She loved him when
he was a boy, and before her marriage they treated each other as
equals; she was twenty-five and he was fifteen. She had been in love
then with his deceased friend, Nikolenka Irtenieff. They both loved
Nikolenka, and loved in him and in themselves the good that was in
them, and which unifies all people.

Since that time they had both became corrupted--he by the bad life he
was leading; she by her marriage to a man whom she loved sensually,
but who not only did not love all that which she and Dimitri at one
time considered most holy and precious, but did not even understand
it, and all those aspirations to moral perfection and to serving
others, to which she had once devoted herself, he ascribed to
selfishness and a desire to show off before people.

Ragojhinsky was a man without reputation or fortune, but a clever
fortune hunter, who, by skillful manoeuvering between liberalism and
conservatism, availing himself of that dominating tendency which
promised bitter results in life, but principally by something peculiar
which attracted women to him, he succeeded in making a relatively
brilliant judicial career. He was already past his youth when he met
Nekhludoff abroad, made Natalie, who was also not very young, to fall
in love with him, and married her almost against the wish of her
mother, who said that it would be a mesalliance. Nekhludoff, although
he concealed it from himself and struggled against the feeling, hated
his brother-in-law. He disliked his vulgar feelings, his
self-confident narrowness of mind, but, principally, because of his
sister, who should so passionately, egotistically and sensually love
such a poor nature, and to please whom she should stifle all her noble
sentiments. It was always painful to Nekhludoff to think of Natalie as
the wife of that hairy, self-confident man, with shining bald head. He
could not even suppress his aversion to his children. And whenever he
heard that she was about to become a mother, he experienced a feeling
of compassion for her being again infected with something bad by the
man who was so unlike all of them.

T