living by means of it; I do not despair; but all the same send me,
if you can, as soon as convenient, 250 roubles. I kiss your hand and
remain...' etc.

Tatyana Borissovna sent her nephew 250 roubles. Two months later he
asked for more; she got together every penny she had and sent it him.
Not six weeks after the second donation he was asking a third time for
help, ostensibly to buy colours for a portrait bespoken by Princess
Tertereshenev. Tatyana Borissovna refused. 'Under these circumstances,'
he wrote to her, 'I propose coming to you to regain my health in the
country.' And in the May of the same year Andryusha did, in fact, return
to Maliya-Briki.

Tatyana Borissovna did not recognise him for the first minute. From his
letter she had expected to see a wasted invalid, and she beheld a stout,
broad-shouldered fellow, with a big red face and greasy, curly hair. The
pale, slender little Andryusha had turned into the stalwart Andrei
Ivanovitch Byelovzorov. And it was not only his exterior that was
transformed. The modest spruceness, the sedateness and tidiness of his
earlier years, was replaced by a careless swagger and slovenliness quite
insufferable; he rolled from side to side as he walked, lolled in
easy-chairs, put his elbows on the table, stretched and yawned, and
behaved rudely to his aunt and the servants. 'I'm an artist,' he would
say; 'a free Cossack! That's our sort!' Sometimes he did not touch a
brush for whole days together; then the inspiration, as he called it,
would come upon him; then he would swagger about as if he were drunk,
clumsy, awkward, and noisy; his cheeks were flushed with a coarse
colour, his eyes dull; he would launch into discourses upon his talent,
his success, his development, the advance he was making.... It turned
out in actual fact that he had barely talent enough to produce passable