dness, _ce Lipoutine,
ce que je ne comprends pas..._ and... and they say she's been putting
vinegar on her head, and here are we with our complaints and
letters.... Oh, how I have tormented her and at such a time! _Je suis un
ingrat!_ Only imagine, I come back and find a letter from her; read it,
read it! Oh, how ungrateful it was of me!"

He gave me a letter he had just received from Varvara Petrovna. She
seemed to have repented of her "stay at home." The letter was amiable
but decided in tone, and brief. She invited Stepan Trofimovitch to come
to her the day after to-morrow, which was Sunday, at twelve o'clock, and
advised him to bring one of his friends with him. (My name was mentioned
in parenthesis). She promised on her side to invite Shatov, as the
brother of Darya Pavlovna. "You can obtain a final answer from her: will
that be enough for you? Is this the formality you were so anxious for?"

"Observe that irritable phrase about formality. Poor thing, poor thing,
the friend of my whole life! I confess the sudden determination of my
whole future almost crushed me.... I confess I still had hopes, but now
_tout est dit._ I know now that all is over. _C'est terrible!_ Oh, that
that Sunday would never come and everything would go on in the old way.
You would have gone on coming and I'd have gone on here...."

"You've been upset by all those nasty things Liputin said, those
slanders."

"My dear, you have touched on another sore spot with your friendly
finger. Such friendly fingers are generally merciless and sometimes
unreasonable; _pardon,_ you may not believe it, but I'd almost forgotten
all that, all that nastiness, not that I forgot it, indeed, but in
my foolishness I tried all the while I was with Lise to be happy and
persuaded myself I was happy. But now... Oh, now I'm thinking of
that generous, humane woman, so long-suffering with my contemptible
failings--not that she's been altogether long-suffering, but what have
I been with my horrid, worthless character! I'm a capricious child, with
all the egoism of a child and none of the innocence. For the last twenty
years she's been looking after me like a nurse, _cette pauvre_ auntie, as
Lise so charmingly calls her.... And now, after twenty years, the child
clamours to be married, sending letter after letter, while her head's
in a vinegar-compress and... now he's got it--on Sunday I shall be a
married man, that's no joke.... And why did I keep insisting myself,
wha