b when he sat down to
cards. His whole figure seemed to exclaim "Cards! Me sit down to whist
with you! Is it consistent? Who is responsible for it? Who has shattered
my energies and turned them to whist? Ah, perish, Russia!" and he would
majestically trump with a heart.

And to tell the truth he dearly loved a game of cards, which led him,
especially in later years, into frequent and unpleasant skirmishes with
Varvara Petrovna, particularly as he was always losing. But of that
later. I will only observe that he was a man of tender conscience (that
is, sometimes) and so was often depressed. In the course of his twenty
years' friendship with Varvara Petrovna he used regularly, three or
four times a year, to sink into a state of "patriotic grief," as it
was called among us, or rather really into an attack of spleen, but our
estimable Varvara Petrovna preferred the former phrase. Of late years
his grief had begun to be not only patriotic, but at times alcoholic
too; but Varvara Petrovna's alertness succeeded in keeping him all his
life from trivial inclinations. And he needed some one to look after him
indeed, for he sometimes behaved very oddly: in the midst of his exalted
sorrow he would begin laughing like any simple peasant. There were
moments when he began to take a humorous tone even about himself. But
there was nothing Varvara Petrovna dreaded so much as a humorous tone.
She was a woman of the classic type, a female Maecenas, invariably
guided only by the highest considerations. The influence of this exalted
lady over her poor friend for twenty years is a fact of the first
importance. I shall need to speak of her more particularly, which I now
proceed to do.

III

There are strange friendships. The two friends are always ready to fly
at one another, and go on like that all their lives, and yet they cannot
separate. Parting, in fact, is utterly impossible. The one who has begun
the quarrel and separated will be the first to fall ill and even die,
perhaps, if the separation comes off. I know for a positive fact that
several times Stepan Trofimovitch has jumped up from the sofa and
beaten the wall with his fists after the most intimate and emotional
_tete-a-tete_ with Varvara Petrovna.

This proceeding was by no means an empty symbol; indeed, on one
occasion, he broke some plaster off the wall. It may be asked how I come
to know such delicate details. What if I were myself a witness of it?
What if Stepan Trofimov