, attentively blinking, and
sticking out his lips, in childish curiosity: he now hastened to carry
the news about the new visitor throughout the town.

* * * * *

On that same day, at eleven o'clock in the evening, this is what was
going on at Mme. Kalitin's house. Down-stairs, on the threshold of the
drawing-room, Vladimir Nikolaitch, having seized a favourable moment,
was saying farewell to Liza, and telling her, as he held her hand: "You
know who it is that attracts me hither; you know why I am incessantly
coming to your house; what is the use of words, when everything is so
plain?" Liza made him no reply, and without a smile, and with eyebrows
slightly elevated, and blushing, she stared at the floor, but did not
withdraw her hand; and up-stairs, in Marfa Timofeevna's chamber, by the
light of the shrine-lamp, which hung in front of the dim, ancient holy
pictures, Lavretzky was sitting in an arm-chair, with his elbows on his
knees, and his face in his hands; the old woman, standing before him, was
silently stroking his hair, from time to time. He spent more than an hour
with her, after taking leave of the mistress of the house; he said almost
nothing to his kind old friend, and she did not interrogate him.... And
what was the use of talking, what was there to interrogate him about? She
understood everything as it was, and she sympathised with everything
wherewith his heart was full to overflowing.

VIII

Feodor Ivanovitch Lavretzky (we must ask the reader's permission to
break the thread of our narrative for a time) was descended from an
ancient family of the nobility. The ancestral founder of the Lavretzkys
had come out of Prussia during the princely reign of Vasily the Blind,
and had been granted two hundred quarters[1] of land, on Byezhetsk
Heights. Many of his descendants were members of various branches of the
public service, and sat under princes and distinguished personages in
distant governorships, but not one of them ever rose above the rank of
table-decker at the Court of the Tzars, or acquired any considerable
fortune. The most opulent and noteworthy of all the Lavretzkys had been
Feodor Ivanitch's great-grandfather, Andrei, a harsh, insolent,
clever, and crafty man. Down to the day of which we are speaking, the
fame of his arbitrary violence, of his fiendish disposition, his mad
lavishness, and unquenchable thirst had