t
such a clever, logical woman as the Princess, with her equally logical
family, could listen to and answer such rubbish. Had it, however,
entered into my head to compare what, others said with what I myself
said when there alone, I should probably have ceased to feel surprise.
Still less should I have continued to feel surprise had I not
believed that the women of our own household--Avdotia, Lubotshka, and
Katenka--were superior to the rest of their sex, for in that case I
should have remembered the kind of things over which Avdotia and Katenka
would laugh and jest with Dubkoff from one end of an evening to the
other. I should have remembered that seldom did an evening pass but
Dubkoff would first have, an argument about something, and then read in
a sententious voice either some verses beginning "Au banquet de la vie,
infortune convive" or extracts from The Demon. In short, I should have
remembered what nonsense they used to chatter for hours at a time.

It need hardly be said that, when guests were present, Varenika paid
less attention to me than when we were alone, as well as that I was
deprived of the reading and music which I so greatly loved to hear. When
talking to guests, she lost, in my eyes, her principal charm--that of
quiet seriousness and simplicity. I remember how strange it used to seem
to me to hear her discoursing on theatres and the weather to my brother
Woloda! I knew that of all things in the world he most despised and
shunned banality, and that Varenika herself used to make fun of forced
conversations on the weather and similar matters. Why, then, when
meeting in society, did they both of them talk such intolerable
nothings, and, as it were, shame one another? After talks of this kind
I used to feel silently resentful against Woloda, as well as next day to
rally Varenika on her overnight guests. Yet one result of it was that
I derived all the greater pleasure from being one of the Nechludoffs'
family circle. Also, for some reason or another I began to prefer
meeting Dimitri in his mother's drawing-room to being with him alone.

XLI. MY FRIENDSHIP WITH THE NECHLUDOFFS

At this period, indeed, my friendship with Dimitri hung by a hair. I
had been criticising him too long not to have discovered faults in his
character, for it is only in first youth that we love passionately and
therefore love only perfect people. As soon as the mists engendered by
love of this kind begin to dissolve, and to be