he felt some slight relief,
though that too was deceptive. A woman is always a woman even if she is
a nun. She smiled, shook her head and then blushed crimson and dropped
her eyes, which roused Stepan Trofimovitch to absolute ecstasy and
inspiration so much that he began fibbing freely. Varvara Petrovna
appeared in his story as an enchanting brunette (who had been the rage
of Petersburg and many European capitals) and her husband "had been
struck down on the field of Sevastopol" simply because he had felt
unworthy of her love, and had yielded her to his rival, that is, Stepan
Trofimovitch...."Don't be shocked, my gentle one, my Christian," he
exclaimed to Sofya Matveyevna, almost believing himself in all that he
was telling, "it was something so lofty, so subtle, that we never spoke
of it to one another all our lives." As the story went on, the cause
of this position of affairs appeared to be a blonde lady (if not Darya
Pavlovna I don't know of whom Stepan Trofimovitch could have been
thinking), this blonde owed everything to the brunette, and had grown up
in her house, being a distant relation. The brunette observing at last
the love of the blonde girl to Stepan Trofimovitch, kept her feelings
locked up in her heart. The blonde girl, noticing on her part the love
of the brunette to Stepan Trofimovitch, also locked her feelings in her
own heart. And all three, pining with mutual magnanimity, kept silent in
this way for twenty years, locking their feelings in their hearts. "Oh,
what a passion that was, what a passion that was!" he exclaimed with a
stifled sob of genuine ecstasy. "I saw the full blooming of her beauty"
(of the brunette's, that is), "I saw daily with an ache in my heart
how she passed by me as though ashamed she was so fair" (once he said
"ashamed she was so fat"). At last he had run away, casting off all this
feverish dream of twenty years--_vingt ans_--and now here he was on the
high road....

Then in a sort of delirium be began explaining to Sofya Matveyevna the
significance of their meeting that day, "so chance an encounter and
so fateful for all eternity." Sofya Matveyevna got up from the sofa in
terrible confusion at last. He had positively made an attempt to drop on
his knees before her, which made her cry. It was beginning to get dark.
They had been for some hours shut up in the room....

"No, you'd better let me go into the other room," she faltered, "or else
there's no knowing what people may th