mistiness, to get out of the society of all these artists, scholars,
and Montenegrins, and do like everybody else.'

'How am I to understand you?' asked Anna Vassilyevna.

'Well, if you will kindly listen,' answered Nikolai Artemyevitch,
still with the same dropping of the corners of his lips, 'I will tell
you plainly, without beating about the bush. I have made acquaintance,
I have become intimate with this young man, Mr. Kurnatovsky, in the
hope of having him for a son-in-law. I venture to think that when you
see him, you will not accuse me of partiality or precipitate
judgment.' (Nikolai Artemyevitch was admiring his own eloquence as he
talked.) 'Of excellent education--educated in the highest legal
college--excellent manners, thirty-three years old, and
upper-secretary, a councillor, and a Stanislas cross on his neck. You,
I hope, will do me the justice to allow that I do not belong to the
number of those _peres de famille_ who are mad for position; but you
yourself told me that Elena Nikolaevna likes practical business men;
Yegor Andreyevitch is in the first place a business man; now on the
other side, my daughter has a weakness for generous actions; so let me
tell you that Yegor Andreyevitch, directly he had attained the
possibility--you understand me--the possibility of living without
privation on his salary, at once gave up the yearly income assigned
him by his father, for the benefit of his brothers.'

'Who is his father?' inquired Anna Vassilyevna.

'His father? His father is a man well-known in his own line, of the
highest moral character, _un vrai stoicien_, a retired major, I think,
overseer of all the estates of the Count B----'