ed
everything to be wholly countrified. After delivering myself of this
extraordinary and complicated romance, I grew confused, and blushed so
much that every one must have seen that I was lying. Both Varenika, who
was handing me a cup of tea, and Sophia Ivanovna, who had been gazing at
me throughout, turned their heads away, and began to talk of something
else with an expression which I afterwards learnt that good-natured
people assume when a very young man has told them a manifest string of
lies--an expression which says, "Yes, we know he is lying, and why he is
doing it, the poor young fellow!"

What I had said about Prince Ivan Ivanovitch having a country villa, I
had related simply because I could find no other pretext for mentioning
both my relationship to the Prince and the fact that I had been to
luncheon with him that day; yet why I had said all I had about the
balustrading costing 380,000 roubles, and about my having several times
visited the Prince at that villa (I had never once been there--more
especially since the Prince possessed no residences save in Moscow and
Naples, as the Nechludoffs very well knew), I could not possibly tell
you. Neither in childhood nor in adolescence nor in riper years did I
ever remark in myself the vice of falsehood--on the contrary, I was, if
anything, too outspoken and truthful. Yet, during this first stage of
my manhood, I often found myself seized with a strange and unreasonable
tendency to lie in the most desperate fashion. I say advisedly "in the
most desperate fashion," for the reason that I lied in matters in which
it was the easiest thing in the world to detect me. On the whole I
think that a vain-glorious desire to appear different from what I was,
combined with an impossible hope that the lie would never be found out,
was the chief cause of this extraordinary impulse.

After tea, since the rain had stopped and the after-glow of sunset was
calm and clear, the Princess proposed that we should go and stroll in
the lower garden, and admire her favourite spots there. Following my
rule to be always original, and conceiving that clever people like
myself and the Princess must surely be above the banalities of
politeness, I replied that I could not bear a walk with no object in
view, and that, if I DID walk, I liked to walk alone. I had no idea that
this speech was simply rude; all I thought was that, even as nothing
could be more futile than empty compliments, so nothing co