ad to be cut, but it was painful! However, everything
in the world is ordered for the best. She has married an excellent man,
and is well off now.'

'But confess, you have never been able to forgive Rudin, all the same,'
Alexandra Pavlovna was beginning.

'Not at all!' interposed Lezhnyov, 'why, I cried like a child when he
was going abroad. Still, to tell the truth, even then there was the germ
in my heart. And when I met him later abroad... well, by that time I had
grown older.... Rudin struck me in his true light.'

'What was it exactly you discovered in him?'

'Why, all I have been telling you the last hour. But enough of him.
Perhaps everything will turn out all right. I only wanted to show you
that, if I do judge him hardly, it is not because I don't know him.
... As far as concerns Natalya Alexyevna, I won't say any more, but you
should observe your brother.'

'My brother! Why?'

'Why, look at him. Do you really notice nothing?'

Alexandra Pavlovna looked down.

'You are right,' she assented. 'Certainly--my brother--for some time he
has not been himself.... But do you really think----'

'Hush! I think he is coming,' whispered Lezhnyov. 'But Natalya is not a
child, believe me, though unluckily she is as inexperienced as a child.
You will see, that girl will astonish us all.'

'In what way?'

'Oh! in this way.... Do you know it's precisely girls like that who
drown themselves, take poison, and so forth? Don't be misled by
her looking so calm. Her passions are strong, and her character--my
goodness!'

'Come! I think you are indulging in a flight of fancy now. To a
phlegmatic person like you, I suppose even I seem a volcano?'

'Oh, no!' answered Lezhnyov, with a smile. 'And as for character--you
have no character at all, thank God!'

'What impertinence is that?'

'That? It's the highest compliment, believe me.'

Volintsev came in and looked suspiciously at Lezhnyov and his sister. He
had grown thin of late. They both began to talk to him, but he scarcely
smiled in response to their jests, and looked, as Pigasov once said of
him, like a melancholy hare. But there has certainly never been a man in
the world who, at some time in his life, has not looked worse than that.
Volintsev felt that Natalya was drifting away from him, and with her it
seemed as if the earth was giving way under his feet.

VII

The next day was Sunday, and Natalya got up late. The day before she had
been very silent