what was there to ask? Without that she understood all, and felt for
everything of which his heart was full.



Chapter VIII


Fedor Ivanitch Lavretsky--we must ask the reader's permission to break
off the thread of our story for a time--came of an old noble family. The
founder of the house of Lavretskky came over from Prussia in the reign
of Vassili the Blind, and received a grant of two hundred chetverts of
land in Byezhetsk. Many of his descendants filled various offices, and
served under princes and persons of eminence in outlying districts, but
not one of them rose above the rank of an inspector of the Imperial
table nor acquired any considerable fortune. The richest and most
distinguished of all the Lavretskys was Fedor Ivanitch's
great-grandfather, Andrei, a man cruel and daring, cunning and able.
Even to this day stories still linger of his tyranny, his savage temper,
his reckless munificence, and his insatiable avarice. He was very stout
and tall, swarthy of countenance and beardless, he spoke in a thick
voice and seemed half asleep; but the more quietly he spoke the more
those about him trembled. He had managed to get a wife who was a fit
match for him. She was a gipsy by birth, goggle-eyed and hook-nosed,
with a round yellow face. She was irascible and vindictive, and never
gave way in anything to her husband, who almost killed her, and whose
death she did not survive, though she had been for ever quarrelling with
him. The son of Andrei, Piotr, Fedor's grandfather, did not take after
his father; he was a typical landowner of the steppes, rather a
simpleton, loud-voiced, but slow to move, coarse but not ill-natured,