ass of nobles and
proprietors, but who has no serfs belonging to him, and is really a
moujik, or peasant. Some villages are composed of inhabitants of this
class, who are often intelligent, though uneducated.]

The next day Ivan Petrovich sent his father a letter, which was
frigidly and ironically polite, and then betook himself to the estate
of two of his second cousins,--Dmitry Pestof, and his sister Marfa
Timofeevna, with the latter of whom the reader is already acquainted.
He told them everything that had happened, announced his intention of
going to St. Petersburg to seek an appointment, and begged them to
give shelter to his wife, even if only for a time. At the word "wife"
he sobbed bitterly; and, in spite of his metropolitan education, and
his philosophy, he humbly, like a thorough Russian peasant, knelt down
at the feet of his relations, and even touched the floor with his
forehead.

The Pestofs, who were kind and compassionate people, willingly
consented to his request. With them he spent three weeks, secretly
expecting an answer from his father. But no answer came; no answer
could come. Peter Andreich, when he received the news of the marriage,
took to his bed, and gave orders that his son's name should never
again be mentioned to him; but Ivan's mother, without her husband's
knowledge, borrowed five hundred paper roubles from a neighboring
priest,[A] and sent them to her son, with a little sacred picture for
his wife. She was afraid of writing, but she told her messenger, a
spare little peasant who could walk sixty versts in a day, to say to
Ivan that he was not to fret too much; that please God, all would yet
go right, and his father's wrath would turn to kindness--that she,
too, would have preferred a different daughter-in-law; but that
evidently God had willed it as it was, and that she sent her paternal
benediction to Malania Sergievna. The spare little peasant had a
rouble given him, asked leave to see the new mistress, whose gossip[B]
he was, kissed her hand, and returned home.

[Footnote A: Literally, "from the _Blagochinny_" an ecclesiastic who
exercises supervision over a number of churches or parishes, a sort of
Rural Dean.]

[Footnote A: The word is used in its old meaning of fellow-sponsor.]

So Ivan Petrovich betook himself to St. Petersburg with a light heart.
An unknown future lay before him. Poverty might menace him; but he had
broken with the hateful life in the country, and, above all