t ask her yourself, entreat her to do you the honour,
you understand? But don't be uneasy. I shall be here. Besides, you love
her."

Stepan Trofimovitch felt giddy. The walls were going round. There was
one terrible idea underlying this to which he could not reconcile
himself.

_"Excellente amie,"_ his voice quivered suddenly. "I could never have
conceived that you would make up your mind to give me in marriage to
another... woman."

"You're not a girl, Stepan Trofimovitch. Only girls are given in
marriage. You are taking a wife," Varvara Petrovna hissed malignantly.

_"Oui, j'ai pris un mot pour un autre. Mais c'est egal."_ He gazed at her
with a hopeless air.

"I see that _c'est egal_," she muttered contemptuously through her teeth.
"Good heavens! Why he's going to faint. Nastasya, Nastasya, water!"

But water was not needed. He came to himself. Varvara Petrovna took up
her umbrella.

"I see it's no use talking to you now...."

_"Oui, oui, je suis incapable."_

"But by to-morrow you'll have rested and thought it over. Stay at home.
If anything happens let me know, even if it's at night. Don't write
letters, I shan't read them. To-morrow I'll come again at this time
alone, for a final answer, and I trust it will be satisfactory. Try to
have nobody here and no untidiness, for the place isn't fit to be seen.
Nastasya, Nastasya!"

The next day, of course, he consented, and, indeed, he could do nothing
else. There was one circumstance...

VIII

Stepan Trofimovitch's estate, as we used to call it (which consisted
of fifty souls, reckoning in the old fashion, and bordered on
Skvoreshniki), was not really his at all, but his first wife's, and
so belonged now to his son Pyotr Stepanovitch Verhovensky. Stepan
Trofimovitch was simply his trustee, and so, when the nestling was
full-fledged, he had given his father a formal authorisation to manage
the estate. This transaction was a profitable one for the young man. He
received as much as a thousand roubles a year by way of revenue from the
estate, though under the new regime it could not have yielded more than
five hundred, and possibly not that. God knows how such an arrangement
had arisen. The whole sum, however, was sent the young man by Varvara
Petrovna, and Stepan Trofimovitch had nothing to do with a single rouble
of it. On the other hand, the whole revenue from the land remained in
his pocket, and he had, besides, completely ruined the estate, letting
it