at me. Sure enough, at length she raised her head, threw me a
glance, and, meeting my eyes, turned away.

"The rain does not seem to stop," she remarked.

Suddenly a new feeling came over me. I began to feel as though
everything now happening to me was a repetition of some similar
occurrence before--as though on some previous occasion a shower of rain
had begun to fall, and the sun had set behind birch-trees, and I
had been looking at her, and she had been reading aloud, and I had
magnetised her, and she had looked up at me. Yes, all this I seemed to
recall as though it had happened once before.

"Surely she is not--SHE?" was my thought. "Surely IT is not beginning?"
However, I soon decided that Varenika was not the "SHE" referred to, and
that "it" was not "beginning." "In the first place," I said to myself,
"Varenika is not at all BEAUTIFUL. She is just an ordinary girl whose
acquaintance I have made in the ordinary way, whereas the she whom I
shall meet somewhere and some day and in some not ordinary way will
be anything but ordinary. This family pleases me so much only because
hitherto I have never seen anybody. Such things will always be happening
in the future, and I shall see many more such families during my life."

XXVI. I SHOW OFF

AT tea time the reading came to an end, and the ladies began to talk
among themselves of persons and things unknown to me. This I conceived
them to be doing on purpose to make me conscious (for all their kind
demeanour) of the difference which years and position in the world had
set between them and myself. In general discussions, however, in which I
could take part I sought to atone for my late silence by exhibiting that
extraordinary cleverness and originality to which I felt compelled by
my University uniform. For instance, when the conversation turned upon
country houses, I said that Prince Ivan Ivanovitch had a villa near
Moscow which people came to see even from London and Paris, and that
it contained balustrading which had cost 380,000 roubles. Likewise, I
remarked that the Prince was a very near relation of mine, and that,
when lunching with him the same day, he had invited me to go and spend
the entire summer with him at that villa, but that I had declined, since
I knew the villa well, and had stayed in it more than once, and that all
those balustradings and bridges did not interest me, since I could
not bear ornamental work, especially in the country, where I lik