, the deed was
done, the habits had become rooted. He did not know how to make
acquaintance with people: at twenty-three years of age, with an
indomitable thirst for love in his shame-stricken heart, he did not dare
to look a single woman in the eye. With his clear, solid but somewhat
heavy sense, with his inclination to stubbornness, contemplation, and
indolence, he ought, from his earliest years, to have been cast into the
whirlpool of life, but he had been kept in an artificial isolation....
And now the charmed circle was broken, yet he continued to stand in one
spot, locked up, tightly compressed in himself. It was ridiculous, at his
age, to don a student's uniform; but he was not afraid of ridicule: his
Spartan training had served its turn to this extent at least, that it had
developed in him scorn for other people's remarks,--and so, unabashed, he
donned the uniform of a student. He entered the physico-mathematical
department. Healthy, rosy-cheeked, with a well-grown beard, taciturn, he
produced a strange impression upon his comrades; they did not suspect
that in this surly man, who punctually drove to the lectures in a roomy
country sledge and pair, there was concealed almost a child. He seemed to
them some sort of wise pedant; they did not need him and did not seek his
society, he avoided them. In the course of the first two years which he
spent at the university, he came into close contact with only one
student, from whom he took lessons in Latin. This student, Mikhalevitch
by name, an enthusiast and a poet, sincerely loved Lavretzky, and quite
innocently became the cause of an important change in his fate.

One day, at the theatre (Motchaloff was then at the height of his fame,
and Lavretzky never missed a performance), he saw a young girl in a box
of the _bel-etage_,--and, although no woman ever passed his surly figure
without causing his heart to quiver, it never yet had beaten so
violently. With her elbows resting on the velvet of the box, the young
girl sat motionless; alert, young life sparkled in every feature of her
pretty, round, dark-skinned face; an elegant mind was expressed in the
beautiful eyes which gazed attentively and softly from beneath slender
brows, in the swift smile of her expressive lips, in the very attitude of
her head, her arms, her neck; she was charmingly dressed. Beside her sat
a wrinkled, sallow woman, forty-five years of age, with a toothless smile
on her constrainedly-anxious and