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ridicule.’
    ‘I’m sure he does. But why are you going on about him?’
    ‘One ought to be fair, Yevgeny.’
    ‘How does that follow?’
    ‘No, listen…’
    And Arkady told him his uncle’s story. The reader will find it in the next chapter.

VII
    Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov was educated first at home, like his younger brother Nikolay, then at the Corps des Pages. 1 Since childhood he had been exceptionally good-looking; furthermore he had self-confidence, and a slightly mocking and sardonic
     wit – he couldn’t fail to please. He began to be seen everywhere as soon as he was commissioned an officer. He was made a
     fuss of and he indulged himself, he even played the fool and put on airs; but that too suited him. Women went mad over him,
     men called him a fop and secretly envied him. As has been said, he shared an apartment with his brother, whom he loved sincerely,
     although they were quite different. Nikolay Petrovich
had a slight limp, small features, attractive but slightly sad, small, black eyes and soft, fine hair. He was happy doing
     nothing but he was also happy reading, and he was frightened of society. Pavel Petrovich never spent an evening at home, he
     was known for his courage and agility (he started to create a vogue for gymnastics among young men of fashion) and had read
     only five or six French books. At the age of twenty-eight he was already a captain. A glittering career awaited him. Suddenly
     everything changed.
    At that time there occasionally used to appear in Petersburg society a woman who is remembered to this day, Princess R. She
     had a husband, well educated and respectable if a bit of a fool; they had no children. She would suddenly go off abroad and
     as suddenly come back to Russia; she generally led an odd life. She had the reputation of being a giddy flirt, gave herself
     enthusiastically to all kinds of pleasures, danced till she dropped, laughed and joked with the young men to whom she was
     at home before dinner in the dim light of her drawing room. But at night she would weep and pray – she could find no peace
     anywhere and often used to walk up and down her room till morning, wringing her hands in misery, or she would sit, all pale
     and chilled, over her prayer book. Day broke, and again she was transformed into the society lady, again she would go out,
     laugh, chatter and virtually throw herself at anything that could afford her the slightest distraction. Her body was amazing;
     her plait of hair, golden in colour and heavy as gold, fell below her knees; but no one would call her a beauty; her face’s
     only good feature was her eyes, and not really her actual eyes – which were small and grey – but their gaze, swift and deep,
     carefree to foolhardiness and pensive to desperation, their enigmatic gaze. Something unusual shone there even when her tongue
     was babbling the most vacuous of speeches. She dressed exquisitely.
    Pavel Petrovich met her at a ball, danced with her the whole mazurka, during which she uttered not a single word of sense,
     and fell passionately in love with her. Accustomed to conquests, here too he quickly achieved his goal; but the ease of his
     triumph did not cool his ardour. On the contrary: he became ever
more painfully, ever more strongly attracted to this woman, who, even at the moment when she irrevocably surrendered herself,
     kept secret and inaccessible a place where none could penetrate. What lay enshrined in that soul – God knows! She seemed at
     the mercy of some secret powers, powers she herself was unaware of; they played with her as they chose; her small mind could
     not cope with their whims. Her whole behaviour displayed a series of contradictions; the only letters which could have aroused
     her husband’s justifiable suspicion she wrote to a man who was practically a stranger, and her love showed itself as melancholy;
     she didn’t really laugh and joke with the man she had chosen, whom she would listen to and watch with