ent on the way to the Crimea,
where he was hastening to join the army on active service. Varvara
Petrovna was left a widow and put on deep mourning. She could not, it is
true, deplore his death very deeply, since, for the last four years,
she had been completely separated from him owing to incompatibility of
temper, and was giving him an allowance. (The Lieutenant-General himself
had nothing but one hundred and fifty serfs and his pay, besides his
position and his connections. All the money and Skvoreshniki belonged to
Varvara Petrovna, the only daughter of a very rich contractor.) Yet she
was shocked by the suddenness of the news, and retired into complete
solitude. Stepan Trofimovitch, of course, was always at her side.

May was in its full beauty. The evenings were exquisite. The wild cherry
was in flower. The two friends walked every evening in the garden and
used to sit till nightfall in the arbour, and pour out their thoughts
and feelings to one another. They had poetic moments. Under the
influence of the change in her position Varvara Petrovna talked more
than usual. She, as it were, clung to the heart of her friend, and this
continued for several evenings. A strange idea suddenly came over Stepan
Trofimovitch: "Was not the inconsolable widow reckoning upon him, and
expecting from him, when her mourning was over, the offer of his hand?"
A cynical idea, but the very loftiness of a man's nature sometimes
increases a disposition to cynical ideas if only from the many-sidedness
of his culture. He began to look more deeply into it, and thought it
seemed like it. He pondered: "Her fortune is immense, of course, but..."
Varvara Petrovna certainly could not be called a beauty. She was a
tall, yellow, bony woman with an extremely long face, suggestive of a
horse. Stepan Trofimovitch hesitated more and more, he was tortured by
doubts, he positively shed tears of indecision once or twice (he wept
not infrequently). In the evenings, that is to say in the arbour, his
countenance involuntarily began to express something capricious and
ironical, something coquettish and at the same time condescending. This
is apt to happen as it were by accident, and the more gentlemanly the
man the more noticeable it is. Goodness only knows what one is to think
about it, but it's most likely that nothing had begun working in her
heart that could have fully justified Stepan Trofimovitch's suspicions.
Moreover, she would not have changed her name