unfold his whole story with such haste that at
first it was difficult to understand him. It went on for a long time.
The soup was served, the fowl was brought in, followed at last by the
samovar, and still he talked on. He told it somewhat strangely and
hysterically, and indeed he was ill. It was a sudden, extreme effort
of his intellectual faculties, which was bound in his overstrained
condition, of course--Sofya Matveyevna foresaw it with distress all
the time he was talking--to result immediately afterwards in extreme
exhaustion. He began his story almost with his childhood, when, "with
fresh heart, he ran about the meadows; it was an hour before he reached
his two marriages and his life in Berlin. I dare not laugh, however. It
really was for him a matter of the utmost importance, and to adopt the
modern jargon, almost a question of struggling for existence." He saw
before him the woman whom he had already elected to share his new life,
and was in haste to consecrate her, so to speak. His genius must not be
hidden from her.... Perhaps he had formed a very exaggerated estimate
of Sofya Matveyevna, but he had already chosen her. He could not exist
without a woman. He saw clearly from her face that she hardly understood
him, and could not grasp even the most essential part. "_Ce n'est rien,
nous attendrons,_ and meanwhile she can feel it intuitively.... My
friend, I need nothing but your heart!" he exclaimed, interrupting his
narrative, "and that sweet enchanting look with which you are gazing at
me now. Oh, don't blush! I've told you already..." The poor woman who
had fallen into his hands found much that was obscure, especially when
his autobiography almost passed into a complete dissertation on the fact
that no one had been ever able to understand Stepan Trofimovitch,
and that "men of genius are wasted in Russia." It was all "so very
intellectual," she reported afterwards dejectedly. She listened in
evident misery, rather round-eyed. When Stepan Trofimovitch fell into
a humorous vein and threw off witty sarcasms at the expense of our
advanced and governing classes, she twice made grievous efforts to laugh
in response to his laughter, but the result was worse than tears, so
that Stepan Trofimovitch was at last embarrassed by it himself and
attacked "the nihilists and modern people" with all the greater wrath
and zest. At this point he simply alarmed her, and it was not until he
began upon the romance of his life that s