door, in the
full conviction that everything was now over, and that he had cut short
all friendly relations with Stepan Trofimovitch for ever. But the latter
always succeeded in stopping him in time.

"Hadn't we better make it up, Shatov, after all these endearments," he
would say, benignly holding out his hand to him from his arm-chair.

Shatov, clumsy and bashful, disliked sentimentality. Externally he was
rough, but inwardly, I believe, he had great delicacy. Although he often
went too far, he was the first to suffer for it. Muttering something
between his teeth in response to Stepan Trofimovitch's appeal, and
shuffling with his feet like a bear, he gave a sudden and unexpected
smile, put down his cap, and sat down in the same chair as before, with
his eyes stubbornly fixed on the ground. Wine was, of course, brought
in, and Stepan Trofimovitch proposed some suitable toast, for instance
the memory of some leading man of the past.

CHAPTER II. PRINCE HARRY. MATCHMAKING.

THERE WAS ANOTHER being in the world to whom Varvara Petrovna was as
much attached as she was to Stepan Trofimovitch, her only son, Nikolay
Vsyevolodovitch Stavrogin. It was to undertake his education that Stepan
Trofimovitch had been engaged. The boy was at that time eight years old,
and his frivolous father, General Stavrogin, was already living apart
from Varvara Petrovna, so that the child grew up entirely in his
mother's care. To do Stepan Trofimovitch justice, he knew how to win his
pupil's heart. The whole secret of this lay in the fact that he was a
child himself. I was not there in those days, and he continually felt
the want of a real friend. He did not hesitate to make a friend of this
little creature as soon as he had grown a little older. It somehow came
to pass quite naturally that there seemed to be no discrepancy of age
between them. More than once he awaked his ten- or eleven-year-old
friend at night, simply to pour out his wounded feelings and weep before
him, or to tell him some family secret, without realising that this was
an outrageous proceeding. They threw themselves into each other's arms
and wept. The boy knew that his mother loved him very much, but I doubt
whether he cared much for her. She talked little to him and did not
often interfere with him, but he was always morbidly conscious of her
intent, searching eyes fixed upon him. Yet the mother confided his whole
instruction and moral education to Stepan Trofimov