about me and your betrothed.
Now it's very different. And what has the Cosaque du Don to do with it,
and what tomb do you mean? I don't understand the comparison. On the
contrary, you have only to live. Live as long as you can. I shall be
delighted."

"In an almshouse?"

"In an almshouse? People don't go into almshouses with three thousand
roubles a year. Ah, I remember," she laughed. "Pyotr Stepanovitch
did joke about an almshouse once. Bah, there certainly is a special
almshouse, which is worth considering. It's for persons who are highly
respectable; there are colonels there, and there's positively one
general who wants to get into it. If you went into it with all your
money, you would find peace, comfort, servants to wait on you. There you
could occupy yourself with study, and could always make up a party for
cards."

_"Passons."_

_"Passons?"_ Varvara Petrovna winced. "But, if so, that's all. You've been
informed that we shall live henceforward entirely apart."

"And that's all?" he said. "All that's left of twenty years? Our last
farewell?"

"You're awfully fond of these exclamations, Stepan Trofimovitch. It's
not at all the fashion. Nowadays people talk roughly but simply. You
keep harping on our twenty years! Twenty years of mutual vanity, and
nothing more. Every letter you've written me was written not for me but
for posterity. You're a stylist, and not a friend, and friendship is
only a splendid word. In reality--a mutual exchange of sloppiness...."

"Good heavens! How many sayings not your own! Lessons learned by heart!
They've already put their uniform on you too. You, too, are rejoicing;
you, too, are basking in the sunshine. _Chere, chere,_ for what a mess of
pottage you have sold them your freedom!"

"I'm not a parrot, to repeat other people's phrases!" cried Varvara
Petrovna, boiling over. "You may be sure I have stored up many sayings
of my own. What have you been doing for me all these twenty years? You
refused me even the books I ordered for you, though, except for the
binder, they would have remained uncut. What did you give me to read
when I asked you during those first years to be my guide? Always Kapfig,
and nothing but Kapfig. You were jealous of my culture even, and took
measures. And all the while every one's laughing at you. I must confess
I always considered you only as a critic. You are a literary critic and
nothing more. When on the way to Petersburg I told you that I meant
to f