let. His ample limbs were covered with the
lightest bedclothes. On the little table by the bedside a candle was
burning dimly beside a jug of kvas, and on the bed at Uvar ivanovitch's
feet was sitting Shubin in a dejected pose.

'Yes,' he was saying meditatively, 'she is married and getting ready
to go away. Your nephew was bawling and shouting for the benefit of the
whole house; he had shut himself up for greater privacy in his wife's
bedroom, but not merely the maids and the footmen, the coachman even
could hear it all! Now he's just tearing and raving round; he all but
gave me a thrashing, he's bringing a father's curse on the scene now,
as cross as a bear with a sore head; but that's of no importance. Anna
Vassilyevna's crushed, but she's much more brokenhearted at her daughter
leaving her than at her marriage.'

Uvar Ivanovitch flourished his fingers.

'A mother,' he commented, 'to be sure.'

'Your nephew,' resumed Shubin, 'threatens to lodge a complaint with the
Metropolitan and the General-Governor and the Minister, but it will end
by her going. A happy thought to ruin his own daughter! He'll crow a
little and then lower his colours.'

'They'd no right,' observed Uvar Ivanovitch, and he drank out of the
jug.

'To be sure. But what a storm of criticism, gossip, and comments will be
raised in Moscow! She's not afraid of them.... Besides she's above them.
She's going away... and it's awful to think where she's going--to such a
distance, such a wilderness! What future awaits her there? I seem to
see her setting off from a posting station in a snow-storm with thirty
degrees of frost. She's leaving her country, and her people; but I
understand her doing it. Whom is she leaving here behind her? What
people has she seen? Kurnatovsky and Bersenyev and our humble selves;
and these are the best she's seen. What is there to regret about it? One
thing's bad; I'm told her husband--the devil, how that word sticks in my
throat!--Insarov, I'm told, is spitting blood; that's a bad lookout. I
saw him the other day: his face--you could model Brutus from it straight
off. Do you know who Brutus was, Uvar Ivanovitch?'

'What is there to know? a man to be sure.'

'Precisely so: he was a "man." Yes he's a wonderful face, but unhealthy,
very unhealthy.'

'For fighting... it makes no difference,' observed Uvar Ivanovitch.

'For fighting it makes no difference, certainly; you are pleased to
express yourself with great justice to