loving heart; life had soon crushed her.

Pavel Yakovlitch Shubin happened to be a distant cousin of hers. His
father had been a government official in Moscow. His brothers had
entered cadets' corps; he was the youngest, his mother's darling, and
of delicate constitution; he stopped at home. They intended him for
the university, and strained every effort to keep him at the
gymnasium. From his early years he began to show an inclination for
sculpture. The ponderous senator, Volgin, saw a statuette of his one
day at his aunt's--he was then sixteen--and declared that he intended
to protect this youthful genius. The sudden death of Shubin's father
very nearly effected a complete transformation in the young man's
future. The senator, the patron of genius, made him a present of a
bust of Homer in plaster, and did nothing more. But Anna Vassilyevna
helped him with money, and at nineteen he scraped through into the
university in the faculty of medicine. Pavel felt no inclination for
medical science, but, as the university was then constituted, it was
impossible for him to enter in any other faculty. Besides, he looked
forward to studying anatomy. But he did not complete his anatomical
studies; at the end of the first year, and before the examination, he
left the university to devote himself exclusively to his vocation. He
worked zealously, but by fits and starts; he used to stroll about the
country round Moscow sketching and modelling portraits of peasant
girls, and striking up acquaintance with all sorts of people, young
and old, of high and low degree, Italian models and Russian artists.
He would not hear of the Academy, and recognised no one as a teacher.
He was possessed of unmistakeable talent; it began to be talked about
in Moscow. His mother, who came of a good Parisian family, a
kind-hearted and clever woman, had taught him French thoroughly and
had toiled and thought for him day and night. She was proud of him,