in addition to the praise of your intellect and strength of character no praise has been bestowed upon you for your good qualities; you yourself don’t claim to have them, and you do not look upon them as worth having, but rather you regard them as characteristic of stupidity. Consequently you will not ask further praise than what I have just given you. But I can say one thing more in your favor: of all the people whom I do not like, and with whom I do not like to have business, I would rather deal with you than all the rest. Of course you are unmerciful wherever it affects your advantage; but if you have no advantage in doing anybody harm, you will not do it out of stupid little spitefulness. You consider that it is not worth while to lose time, labor, and money without return. Of course you would have been glad to roast your daughter and her husband over a slow fire; but you were able to curb your revengeful inclination and to reason the matter over coolly, and you understood that you had no chance of success in roasting them, and this is a great thing, Marya Alekséyevna, to be able to recognize an impossibility! When you once recognized it you gave up your idea of beginning a lawsuit, since the lawsuit would not punish the people who stirred up your anger; you calculated that those little unpleasantnesses, which a lawsuit would cause them, would bring you yourself into more bother and expense, and therefore you did not begin the lawsuit. If it is impossible to conquer an enemy; if, in causing him a trifling loss you are causing yourself a greater, then you had better not begin the battle; you understood this, and you had the common sense and courage to yield to an impossibility, without unnecessarily causing harm to yourself or anybody else: this, too, was a great thing, Marya Alekséyevna. Yes, Marya Alekséyevna, one can get along with you; you do not indulge in wrath for the sake of wrath, to your own detriment: and this is a very rare and very important quality, Marya Alekséyevna. Millions of people are more injurious to themselves and others than you are, Marya Alekséyevna, even though they may not have that detestable side that you have. You are better than the majority of those who are simply bad, because you are not without reason and are not stupid. I should have been glad to sponge you off from the face of the earth, but I have a certain regard for you: you do harm in no way. Now you are spending your time in mean business because your environment is so constituted, but put you into other circumstances, and you would take delight in being harmless, in being even useful, because you do not want to do any harm without being paid for it, and it were profitable to you, you could do whatever you wanted; consequently, you would act honorably and nobly if it were advisable. You are capable of doing so, Marya Alekséyevna, and you are not to blame because this capability is latent; that instead of doing so, you are acting in a contrary way; but you possess it, and this cannot be said of all. Wretches are capable of doing anything. You are only a bad woman, but you are not hopelessly a wretched woman. You are higher than many, even if judged by the moral standard.
“Are you satisfied, Marya Alekséyevna?”
“What should I be satisfied for, bátiushka. My circumstances are bad, aren’t they?”
“That is all right, Marya Alekséyevna!”
Part III
Marriage and Second Love
I
Three months have passed since Viérotchka was rescued from the cellar. The Lopukhófs’ affairs have prospered. He has had a fair number of pupils; he obtained work of a certain publisher, to translate a textbook on geography. Viéra Pavlovna also found two pupils, not of the highest grade, but still not to be despised. Together they have an income of eighty rubles a month. But such an income scarcely allows anyone to live luxuriously, but they ran no risk of running into poverty. Their means have gradually increased, and they have calculated that in four months or even sooner they can set up their own establishment. And this was afterwards realized.
The system of their lives was arranged, of course not absolutely in accordance with Viérotchka’s half-jesting, half-serious plan proposed on the day of their fantastic engagement, but nevertheless it was very much like it. The old man and woman at whose house they lived, gossiped together about the strange way in which the young couple lived—as though they were not young people at all, not even like husband and wife; like nobody else in the world.
“Well, now, Petrovna, it seems to me just as queer as it does to you. You could not tell for the life of you whether she wan’t his sister and he her brother!”
“You think that’s a good comparison, do you? Between brother and sister there ain’t any ceremony at all. But look at them! He gits up, puts on his clo’es, and sits down and waits till the samovar is brought. Then he makes tea and calls her, and she too comes out all dressed. What kind of a brother and sister’s that? You had better say this: being as there’s poor folks who through their poverty have to live two families in one apartment; and you might compare them to such!”
“And how is it, Petrovna, that a husband can’t go into his wife’s room? When she ain’t dressed, she don’t let him in. What does that look like?”
“You ought to see how they part at night. She says: ‘Proshchaï mílenki, good night.’ Then they separate, each to sit in their own rooms. They read books, and he sometimes writes. Just you listen and I’ll tell you what happened once.
