that his son should grow up a
Spartan. A gymnastic instructor was his principal teacher, although he
also studied natural science, mathematics, and international law. Music,
as a pursuit unworthy of a man, was discarded. The female sex he was
taught to hold in contempt, and all the gentler arts and emotions were
rigorously repressed. The boy was conscious of defects in his education,
and from his eighteenth year set himself to remedy them as far as he
could. His father died when he was twenty-two, and young Lavretsky
determined to go to Moscow, in the hope that diligent study might enable
him to regain the ground lost in youth.

The whole tendency of his education had been to make him into a shy man:
he could not get on with people; with an unquenchable thirst for love in
his heart, he had never yet dared to look a woman in the face. Robust,
rosy-cheeked, bearded, and taciturn, he produced a strange impression on
his companions, who did not suspect that this outwardly austere man was
inwardly almost a child. He appeared to them to be a queer kind of
pedant; they did not care for him, made no overtures to him, and he
avoided them. During the first two years he spent at the University he
only became fairly intimate with one student, Mihalevitch by name, for
he took lessons in Latin.

One day at the theatre he saw in a box in the front tier a young girl
leaning her elbow on the velvet of the box. The light of youth and life
played in every feature of her lovely dark oval face; subtle
intelligence was expressed in the splendid eyes which gazed softly and
attentively from under her fine brows, in the swift smile of her
sensitive lips, in the very poise of her head, her hands, her neck.

Suddenly the door of her box opened, and a man came in--it was
Mihalevitch. The appearance of this man, almost his only acquaintance in
Moscow, on the society of the girl who had suddenly absorbed his whole
attention, struck him as curious and significant. The performance ceased
to interest Lavretsky, and at one pathetic part he involuntarily looked
at his beauty: she was bending forward, her cheeks glowing. Under the
influence of his persistent gaze her eyes slowly turned and rested on
him.

All night he was haunted by those eyes. The skilfully constructed
barriers were broken down at last; he was in a shiver and a fever, and
the next day he went to Mihalevitch, from whom he learnt that her name
was Barbara Paulovna Korobyin. Mihalevitch