sed to being betrothed to her. On the morning of his wedding day he
sent her a poem. She liked all this very much, even the poem; it's no
joke to be forty. He was very quickly raised to a certain grade and
received a certain order of distinction, and then was appointed governor
of our province.

Before coming to us Yulia Mihailovna worked hard at moulding her
husband. In her opinion he was not without abilities, he knew how to
make an entrance and to appear to advantage, he understood how to
listen and be silent with profundity, had acquired a quite distinguished
deportment, could make a speech, indeed had even some odds and ends of
thought, and had caught the necessary gloss of modern liberalism. What
worried her, however, was that he was not very open to new ideas, and
after the long, everlasting plodding for a career, was unmistakably
beginning to feel the need of repose. She tried to infect him with her
own ambition, and he suddenly began making a toy church: the pastor came
out to preach the sermon, the congregation listened with their hands
before them, one lady was drying her tears with her handkerchief, one
old gentleman was blowing his nose; finally the organ pealed forth. It
had been ordered from Switzerland, and made expressly in spite of all
expense. Yulia Mihailovna, in positive alarm, carried off the whole
structure as soon as she knew about it, and locked it up in a box in
her own room. To make up for it she allowed him to write a novel on
condition of its being kept secret. From that time she began to reckon
only upon herself. Unhappily there was a good deal of shallowness and
lack of judgment in her attitude. Destiny had kept her too long an old
maid. Now one idea after another fluttered through her ambitious and
rather over-excited brain. She cherished designs, she positively desired
to rule the province, dreamed of becoming at once the centre of a
circle, adopted political sympathies. Von Lembke was actually a little
alarmed, though, with his official tact, he quickly divined that he had
no need at all to be uneasy about the government of the province itself.
The first two or three months passed indeed very satisfactorily. But now
Pyotr Stepanovitch had turned up, and something queer began to happen.

The fact was that young Verhovensky, from the first step, had displayed
a flagrant lack of respect for Andrey Antonovitch, and had assumed a
strange right to dictate to him; while Yulia Mihailovna, who h