ot sent for him?' answered, still quite pale, but
scrupulously brushed and shaved, 'Why, I seem to recollect you said
yourself you didn't believe in medicine.' So the days went by. Bazarov
went on obstinately and grimly working ... and meanwhile there was in
Nikolai Petrovitch's house one creature to whom, if he did not open his
heart, he at least was glad to talk.... That creature was Fenitchka.

He used to meet her for the most part early in the morning, in the
garden, or the farmyard; he never used to go to her room to see her,
and she had only once been to his door to inquire--ought she to let
Mitya have his bath or not? It was not only that she confided in him,
that she was not afraid of him--she was positively freer and more at
her ease in her behaviour with him than with Nikolai Petrovitch
himself. It is hard to say how it came about; perhaps it was because
she unconsciously felt the absence in Bazarov of all gentility, of all
that superiority which at once attracts and overawes. In her eyes he
was both an excellent doctor and a simple man. She looked after her
baby without constraint in his presence; and once when she was suddenly
attacked with giddiness and headache--she took a spoonful of medicine
from his hand. Before Nikolai Petrovitch she kept, as it were, at a
distance from Bazarov; she acted in this way not from hypocrisy, but
from a kind of feeling of propriety. Pavel Petrovitch she was more
afraid of than ever; for some time he had begun to watch her, and would
suddenly make his appearance, as though he sprang out of the earth
behind her back, in his English suit, with his immovable vigilant face,
and his hands in his pockets. 'It's like a bucket of cold water on
one,' Fenitchka complained to Dunyasha, and the latter sighed in
response, and thought of another 'heartless' man. Bazarov, without the
least suspicion of the fact, had become the _cruel tyrant_ of her
heart.

Fenitchka liked Bazarov; but he liked her too. His face was positively
transformed when he talked to her; it took a bright, almost kind
expression, and his habitual nonchalance was replaced by a sort of
jesting attentiveness. Fenitchka was growing prettier every day. There
is a time in the life of young women when they suddenly begin to expand
and blossom like summer roses; this time had come for Fenitchka.
Dressed in a delicate white dress, she seemed herself slighter and
whiter; she was not tanned by the sun; but the heat, from which s