re I reached Petersburg, Parfen
Rogojin told me a good deal about you; and at the very moment that I
opened the door to you I happened to be thinking of you, when--there you
stood before me!"

"And how did you recognize me?"

"From the portrait!"

"What else?"

"I seemed to imagine you exactly as you are--I seemed to have seen you
somewhere."

"Where--where?"

"I seem to have seen your eyes somewhere; but it cannot be! I have not
seen you--I never was here before. I may have dreamed of you, I don't
know."

The prince said all this with manifest effort--in broken sentences, and
with many drawings of breath. He was evidently much agitated. Nastasia
Philipovna looked at him inquisitively, but did not laugh.

"Bravo, prince!" cried Ferdishenko, delighted.

At this moment a loud voice from behind the group which hedged in the
prince and Nastasia Philipovna, divided the crowd, as it were, and
before them stood the head of the family, General Ivolgin. He was
dressed in evening clothes; his moustache was dyed.

This apparition was too much for Gania. Vain and ambitious almost to
morbidness, he had had much to put up with in the last two months, and
was seeking feverishly for some means of enabling himself to lead a more
presentable kind of existence. At home, he now adopted an attitude
of absolute cynicism, but he could not keep this up before Nastasia
Philipovna, although he had sworn to make her pay after marriage for all
he suffered now. He was experiencing a last humiliation, the bitterest
of all, at this moment--the humiliation of blushing for his own kindred
in his own house. A question flashed through his mind as to whether the
game was really worth the candle.

For that had happened at this moment, which for two months had been his
nightmare; which had filled his soul with dread and shame--the meeting
between his father and Nastasia Philipovna. He had often tried to
imagine such an event, but had found the picture too mortifying and
exasperating, and had quietly dropped it. Very likely he anticipated
far worse things than was at all necessary; it is often so with vain
persons. He had long since determined, therefore, to get his father
out of the way, anywhere, before his marriage, in order to avoid such
a meeting; but when Nastasia entered the room just now, he had been so
overwhelmed with astonishment, that he had not thought of his father,
and had made no arrangements to keep him out of the way. And now