y quiet young man though
he was thirty; he had considerable education though he was chiefly
self-taught. He was poor, married, and in the service, and supported the
aunt and sister of his wife. His wife and all the ladies of his family
professed the very latest convictions, but in rather a crude form.
It was a case of "an idea dragged forth into the street," as Stepan
Trofimovitch had expressed it upon a former occasion. They got it
all out of books, and at the first hint coming from any of our little
progressive corners in Petersburg they were prepared to throw anything
overboard, so soon as they were advised to do so, Madame Virginsky
practised as a midwife in the town. She had lived a long while
in Petersburg as a girl. Virginsky himself was a man of rare
single-heartedness, and I have seldom met more honest fervour.

"I will never, never, abandon these bright hopes," he used to say to me
with shining eyes. Of these "bright hopes" he always spoke quietly, in
a blissful half-whisper, as it were secretly. He was rather tall, but
extremely thin and narrow-shouldered, and had extraordinarily lank hair
of a reddish hue. All Stepan Trofimovitch's condescending gibes at
some of his opinions he accepted mildly, answered him sometimes very
seriously, and often nonplussed him. Stepan Trofimovitch treated him
very kindly, and indeed he behaved like a father to all of us. "You are
all half-hearted chickens," he observed to Virginsky in joke. "All
who are like you, though in you, Virginsky, I have not observed that
narrow-mindedness I found in Petersburg, _chez ces seminaristes_. But
you're a half-hatched chicken all the same. Shatov would give anything
to hatch out, but he's half-hatched too."

"And I?" Liputin inquired.

"You're simply the golden mean which will get on anywhere in its own
way." Liputin was offended.

The story was told of Virginsky, and it was unhappily only too true,
that before his wife had spent a year in lawful wedlock with him she
announced that he was superseded and that she preferred Lebyadkin. This
Lebyadkin, a stranger to the town, turned out afterwards to be a very
dubious character, and not a retired captain as he represented himself
to be. He could do nothing but twist his moustache, drink, and chatter
the most inept nonsense that can possibly be imagined. This fellow, who
was utterly lacking in delicacy, at once settled in his house, glad to
live at another man's expense, ate and slept there an