confidential friend, he disclosed
many new and unexpected details concerning her; incidentally (and of
course unguardedly) he repeated some of her own remarks about persons
known to all in the town, and thereby piqued their vanity. He dropped
it all in a vague and rambling way, like a man free from guile driven
by his sense of honour to the painful necessity of clearing up a perfect
mountain of misunderstandings, and so simple-hearted that he hardly knew
where to begin and where to leave off. He let slip in a rather unguarded
way, too, that Yulia Mihailovna knew the whole secret of Stavrogin and
that she had been at the bottom of the whole intrigue. She had taken
him in too, for he, Pyotr Stepanovitch, had also been in love with this
unhappy Liza, yet he had been so hoodwinked that he had _almost_ taken her
to Stavrogin himself in the carriage. "Yes, yes, it's all very well
for you to laugh, gentlemen, but if only I'd known, if I'd known how it
would end!" he concluded. To various excited inquiries about Stavrogin
he bluntly replied that in his opinion the catastrophe to the Lebyadkins
was a pure coincidence, and that it was all Lebyadkin's own fault for
displaying his money. He explained this particularly well. One of his
listeners observed that it was no good his "pretending"; that he had
eaten and drunk and almost slept at Yulia Mihailovna's, yet now he was
the first to blacken her character, and that this was by no means such
a fine thing to do as he supposed. But Pyotr Stepanovitch immediately
defended himself.

"I ate and drank there not because I had no money, and it's not my fault
that I was invited there. Allow me to judge for myself how far I need to
be grateful for that."

The general impression was in his favour. "He may be rather absurd, and
of course he is a nonsensical fellow, yet still he is not responsible
for Yulia Mihailovna's foolishness. On the contrary, it appears that he
tried to stop her."

About two o'clock the news suddenly came that Stavrogin, about whom
there was so much talk, had suddenly left for Petersburg by the midday
train. This interested people immensely; many of them frowned. Pyotr
Stepanovitch was so much struck that I was told he turned quite pale and
cried out strangely, "Why, how could they have let him go?" He hurried
away from Gaganov's forthwith, yet he was seen in two or three other
houses.

Towards dusk he succeeded in getting in to see Yulia Mihailovna though
he had t