one, and lived for his own pleasure. We were once somehow or other
talking about marriages with him; 'Marriage ... marriage,' said he;
'whom the devil would I let my daughter marry? Eh? what should I do it
for? for her husband to knock her about as I used to my wife? Besides,
whom should I be left with?' Such was the retired lieutenant, Ivan
Semyonitch. Kolosov used to go and see him, not on his account, of
course, but for the sake of his daughter. One fine evening, Andrei was
sitting in the garden with her, chatting about something; Ivan
Semyonitch went up to him, looked sullenly at Varia, and called Andrei
away. 'Listen, my dear fellow,' he said to him; 'you find it good fun,
I see, gossiping with my only child, but I'm dull in my old age; bring
some one with you, or I've nobody to deal a card to; d'ye hear? I
shan't give admittance to you by yourself.' The next day Kolosov turned
up with Gavrilov, and poor Sevastian Sevastianovitch had for a whole
autumn and winter been playing cards in the evenings with the retired
lieutenant; that worthy treated him without ceremony, as it is
called--in other words, fearfully rudely. You now probably realise why
it was that, after Gavrilov's death, Kolosov took me with him to Ivan
Semyonitch's. As he communicated all these details, Kolosov added, 'I
love Varia, she is the dearest girl; she liked you.'

I have forgotten, I fancy, to make known to you that up to that time I
had been afraid of women and avoided them, though I would sometimes, in
solitude, spend whole hours in dreaming of tender interviews, of love,
of mutual love, and so on. Varvara Ivanovna was the first girl with
whom I was forced to talk, by necessity--by necessity it really was.
Varia was an ordinary girl, and yet there are very few such girls in
holy Russia. You will ask me--why so? Because I never noticed in her
anything strained, unnatural, affected; because she was a simple,
candid, rather melancholy creature, because one could never call her 'a