Lavretsky felt that he was not at his ease among his fellow-men;
he had a secret inkling that he was an exceptional character. The
Anglomaniac had played his son a cruel trick; his capricious education
had borne its fruit. For many years he had implicitly obeyed his
father; and when at last he had learned to value him aright, the
effects of his father's teaching were already produced. Certain habits
had become rooted in him. He did not know how to comport himself
towards his fellow-men; at the age of twenty-three, with an eager
longing after love in his bashful heart, he had not yet dared to look
a woman in the face. With his clear and logical, but rather sluggish
intellect, with his stubbornness, and his tendency towards inactivity
and contemplation, he ought to have been flung at an early age into
the whirl of life, instead of which he had been deliberately kept
in seclusion. And now the magic circle was broken, but he remained
standing on the same spot, cramped in mind and self-absorbed.

At his age it seemed a little ridiculous to put on the uniform of a
student[A], but he did not fear ridicule. His Spartan education had at
all events been so far useful, inasmuch as it had developed in him a
contempt for the world's gossiping. So he donned a student's uniform
without being disconcerted, enrolling himself in the faculty of
physical and mathematical science. His robust figure, his ruddy
face, his sprouting beard, his taciturn manner, produced a singular
impression on his comrades. They never suspected that under the rough
exterior of this man, who attended the lectures so regularly, driving
up in a capacious rustic sledge, drawn by a couple of horses,
something almost childlike was concealed. They thought him an
eccentric sort of pedant, and they made no advances towards him, being
able to do very well without him. And he, for his part, avoided them.
During the first two years he passed at the university, he became