ly convinced that Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch
really had "made his choice" at Count K.'s. And what was strangest of
all, she was led to believe it by rumours which reached her on no
better authority than other people. She was afraid to ask Nikolay
Vsyevolodovitch a direct question. Two or three times, however, she
could not refrain from slyly and good-humouredly reproaching him for not
being open with her. Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch smiled and remained silent.
The silence was taken as a sign of assent. And yet, all the time she
never forgot the cripple. The thought of her lay like a stone on her
heart, a nightmare, she was tortured by strange misgivings and surmises,
and all this at the same time as she dreamed of Count K.'s daughters.
But of this we shall speak later. Varvara Petrovna began again, of
course, to be treated with extreme deference and respect in society, but
she took little advantage of it and went out rarely.

She did, however, pay a visit of ceremony to the governor's wife. Of
course, no one had been more charmed and delighted by Yulia Mihailovna's
words spoken at the marshal's soiree than she. They lifted a load of
care off her heart, and had at once relieved much of the distress she
had been suffering since that luckless Sunday.

"I misunderstood that woman," she declared, and with her characteristic
impulsiveness she frankly told Yulia Mihailovna that she had come to
_thank her_. Yulia Mihailovna was flattered, but she behaved with dignity.
She was beginning about this time to be very conscious of her own
importance, too much so, in fact. She announced, for example, in the
course of conversation, that she had never heard of Stepan Trofimovitch
as a leading man or a savant.

"I know young Verhovensky, of course, and make much of him. He's
imprudent, but then he's young; he's thoroughly well-informed, though.
He's not an out-of-date, old-fashioned critic, anyway." Varvara Petrovna
hastened to observe that Stepan Trofimovitch had never been a critic,
but had, on the contrary, spent all his life in her house. He was
renowned through circumstances of his early career, "only too well known
to the whole world," and of late for his researches in Spanish
history. Now he intended to write also on the position of modern German
universities, and, she believed, something about the Dresden Madonna
too. In short, Varvara Petrovna refused to surrender Stepan Trofimovitch
to the tender mercies of Yulia Mihailovna.

"The