done, his habits were deeply-rooted. He could not get on with
people; at twenty-three years old, with an unquenchable thirst for love
in his shy heart, he had never yet dared to look one woman in the
face. With his intellect, clear and sound, but somewhat heavy, with his
tendencies to obstinacy, contemplation, and indolence he ought from his
earliest years to have been thrown into the stream of life, and he had
been kept instead in artificial seclusion. And now the magic circle
was broken, but he continued to remain within it, prisoned and pent
up within himself. It was ridiculous at his age to put on a student's
dress, but he was not afraid of ridicule; his Spartan education had at
least the good effect of developing in him a contempt for the opinion of
others, and he put on, without embarrassment, the academical uniform.
He entered the section of physics and mathematics. Robust, rosy-cheeked,
bearded, and taciturn, he produced a strange impression on his
companions; they did not suspect that this austere man, who came so
punctually to the lectures in a wide village sledge with a pair of
horses, was inwardly almost a child. He appeared to them to be a queer
kind of pedant; they did not care for him, and made no overtures to
him, and he avoided them. During the first two years he spent in the
university, he only made acquaintance with one student, from whom he
took lessons in Latin. This student Mihalevitch by name, an enthusiast
and a poet, who loved Lavretsky sincerely, by chance became the means of
bringing about an important change in his destiny.

One day at the theatre--Motchalov was then at the height of his fame
and Lavretsky did not miss a single performance--he saw in a box in the
front tier a young girl, and though no woman ever came near his grim
figure without setting his heart beating, it had never beaten so
violently before. The young girl sat motionless, leaning with her elbows
on the velvet of the box; the light of youth and life played in
every feature of her dark, oval, lovely face; subtle intelligence was
expressed in the splendid eyes which gazed softly and attentively from
under her fine brows, in the swift smile on her expressive lips, in the
very pose of her head, her hands, her neck. She was exquisitely dressed.
Beside her sat a yellow and wrinkled woman of forty-five, with a
low neck, in a black headdress, with a toothless smile on her
intently-preoccupied and empty face, and in the inner recess