of the stone that has fallen
upon them and half crushed them. In appearance Shatov was in complete
harmony with his convictions: he was short, awkward, had a shock of
flaxen hair, broad shoulders, thick lips, very thick overhanging white
eyebrows, a wrinkled forehead, and a hostile, obstinately downcast, as
it were shamefaced, expression in his eyes. His hair was always in a
wild tangle and stood up in a shock which nothing could smooth. He was
seven- or eight-and-twenty.

"I no longer wonder that his wife ran away from him," Varvara Petrovna
enunciated on one occasion after gazing intently at him. He tried to be
neat in his dress, in spite of his extreme poverty. He refrained again
from appealing to Varvara Petrovna, and struggled along as best he
could, doing various jobs for tradespeople. At one time he served in a
shop, at another he was on the point of going as an assistant clerk on a
freight steamer, but he fell ill just at the time of sailing. It is
hard to imagine what poverty he was capable of enduring without thinking
about it at all. After his illness Varvara Petrovna sent him a hundred
roubles, anonymously and in secret. He found out the secret, however,
and after some reflection took the money and went to Varvara Petrovna to
thank her. She received him with warmth, but on this occasion, too,
he shamefully disappointed her. He only stayed five minutes, staring
blankly at the ground and smiling stupidly in profound silence, and
suddenly, at the most interesting point, without listening to what
she was saying, he got up, made an uncouth sideways bow, helpless
with confusion, caught against the lady's expensive inlaid work-table,
upsetting it on the floor and smashing it to atoms, and walked out
nearly dead with shame. Liputin blamed him severely afterwards for
having accepted the hundred roubles and having even gone to thank
Varvara Petrovna for them, instead of having returned the money with
contempt, because it had come from his former despotic mistress. He
lived in solitude on the outskirts of the town, and did not like any
of us to go and see him. He used to turn up invariably at Stepan
Trofimovitch's evenings, and borrowed newspapers and books from him.

There was another young man who always came, one Virginsky, a clerk in
the service here, who had something in common with Shatov, though on
the surface he seemed his complete opposite in every respect. He was a
"family man" too. He was a pathetic and ver