understood
one another in a world of indifferent people.

Anna Mikhaylovna, who often visited the Karagins, while playing cards
with the mother made careful inquiries as to Julie's dowry (she was to
have two estates in Penza and the Nizhegorod forests). Anna Mikhaylovna
regarded the refined sadness that united her son to the wealthy Julie
with emotion, and resignation to the Divine will.

"You are always charming and melancholy, my dear Julie," she said to
the daughter. "Boris says his soul finds repose at your house. He has
suffered so many disappointments and is so sensitive," said she to the
mother. "Ah, my dear, I can't tell you how fond I have grown of Julie
latterly," she said to her son. "But who could help loving her? She is
an angelic being! Ah, Boris, Boris!"--she paused. "And how I pity her
mother," she went on; "today she showed me her accounts and letters from
Penza (they have enormous estates there), and she, poor thing, has no
one to help her, and they do cheat her so!"

Boris smiled almost imperceptibly while listening to his mother. He
laughed blandly at her naive diplomacy but listened to what she had
to say, and sometimes questioned her carefully about the Penza and
Nizhegorod estates.

Julie had long been expecting a proposal from her melancholy adorer and
was ready to accept it; but some secret feeling of repulsion for her,
for her passionate desire to get married, for her artificiality, and
a feeling of horror at renouncing the possibility of real love still
restrained Boris. His leave was expiring. He spent every day and whole
days at the Karagins', and every day on thinking the matter over told
himself that he would propose tomorrow. But in Julie's presence, looking
at her red face and chin (nearly always powdered), her moist eyes, and
her expression of continual readiness to pass at once from melancholy
to an unnatural rapture of married bliss, Boris could not utter the
decisive words, though in imagination he had long regarded himself as
the possessor of those Penza and Nizhegorod estates and had apportioned
the use of the income from them. Julie saw Boris' indecision, and
sometimes the thought occurred to her that she was repulsive to him, but
her feminine self-deception immediately supplied her with consolation,
and she told herself that he was only shy from love. Her melancholy,
however, began to turn to irritability, and not long before Boris'
departure she formed a definite plan of act