of being
the most important person in her house, and was held in the greatest
respect by every one in the town. He used to lose by fifties and
hundreds in an evening at the club of the nobility, and in rank he was
a councillor, which was equal to a lieutenant-colonel in the army, which
was next door to being a colonel. As for his having money, he had
so much from the stout Madame Stavrogin that there was no reckoning
it"--and so on and so on.

_"Mais c'est une dame et tres comme il faut,"_ thought Stepan
Trofimovitch, as he recovered from Anisim's attack, gazing with
agreeable curiosity at his neighbour, the gospel pedlar, who was,
however, drinking the tea from a saucer and nibbling at a piece of
sugar. "_Ce petit morceau de sucre, ce n'est rien...._ There is something
noble and independent about her, and at the same time--gentle. _Le comme
il faut tout pur,_ but rather in a different style."

He soon learned from her that her name was Sofya Matveyevna Ulitin and
she lived at K----, that she had a sister there, a widow; that she was a
widow too, and that her husband, who was a sub-lieutenant risen from the
ranks, had been killed at Sevastopol.

"But you are still so young, _vous n'avez pas trente ans_."

"Thirty-four," said Sofya Matveyevna, smiling.

"What, you understand French?"

"A little. I lived for four years after that in a gentleman's family,
and there I picked it up from the children."

She told him that being left a widow at eighteen she was for some time
in Sevastopol as a nurse, and had afterwards lived in various places,
and now she travelled about selling the gospel.

"_Mais, mon Dieu,_ wasn't it you who had a strange adventure in our town,
a very strange adventure?"

She flushed; it turned out that it had been she.

_"Ces vauriens, ces malheureux,"_ he began in a voice quivering with
indignation; miserable and hateful recollections stirred painfully in
his heart. For a minute he seemed to sink into oblivion.

"Bah, but she's gone away again," he thought, with a start, noticing
that she was not by his side. "She keeps going out and is busy about
something; I notice that she seems upset too.... _Bah, je deviens
egoiste!_"

He raised his eyes and saw Anisim again, but this time in the most
menacing surroundings. The whole cottage was full of peasants, and it
was evidently Anisim who had brought them all in. Among them were the
master of the house, and the peasant with the cow, two other pea