rushed to the governor, and wrote a noble letter in
self-defence to Petersburg. He read it to me twice, but did not send
it, not knowing to whom to address it. In fact he was in a state of
agitation for a whole month, but I am convinced that in the secret
recesses of his heart he was enormously flattered. He almost took the
copy of the collection to bed with him, and kept it hidden under his
mattress in the daytime; he positively would not allow the women to turn
his bed, and although he expected every day a telegram, he held his head
high. No telegram came. Then he made friends with me again, which is a
proof of the extreme kindness of his gentle and unresentful heart.

II

Of course I don't assert that he had never suffered for his convictions
at all, but I am fully convinced that he might have gone on lecturing
on his Arabs as long as he liked, if he had only given the necessary
explanations. But he was too lofty, and he proceeded with peculiar haste
to assure himself that his career was ruined for ever "by the vortex of
circumstance." And if the whole truth is to be told the real cause of
the change in his career was the very delicate proposition which had
been made before and was then renewed by Varvara Petrovna Stavrogin, a
lady of great wealth, the wife of a lieutenant-general, that he should
undertake the education and the whole intellectual development of her
only son in the capacity of a superior sort of teacher and friend, to
say nothing of a magnificent salary. This proposal had been made to
him the first time in Berlin, at the moment when he was first left a
widower. His first wife was a frivolous girl from our province, whom he
married in his early and unthinking youth, and apparently he had had a
great deal of trouble with this young person, charming as she was,
owing to the lack of means for her support; and also from other, more
delicate, reasons. She died in Paris after three years' separation
from him, leaving him a son of five years old; "the fruit of our first,
joyous, and unclouded love," were the words the sorrowing father once
let fall in my presence.

The child had, from the first, been sent back to Russia, where he was
brought up in the charge of distant cousins in some remote region.
Stepan Trofimovitch had declined Varvara Petrovna's proposal on that
occasion and had quickly married again, before the year was over, a
taciturn Berlin girl, and, what makes it more strange, there was no
pa