"It's the truth. It's the truth!"
The inevitable anecdotes followed: Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch's friendly relations with Count K. were recalled.
Count K.'s stern and independent attitude to recent reforms was well known, as well as his remarkable public activity, though that had somewhat fallen off of late.
And now, suddenly, every one was positive that Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch was betrothed to one of the count's daughters, though nothing had given grounds for such a supposition.
And as for some wonderful adventures in Switzerland with Lizaveta Nikolaevna, even the ladies quite dropped all reference to it.
I must mention, by the way, that the Drozdovs had by this time succeeded in paying all the visits they had omitted at first.
Every one now confidently considered Lizaveta Nikolaevna a most ordinary girl, who paraded her delicate nerves.
Her fainting on the day of Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch's arrival was explained now as due to her terror at the student's outrageous behaviour.
They even increased the prosaicness of that to which before they had striven to give such a fantastic colour. As for a lame woman who had been talked of, she was forgotten completely. They were ashamed to remember her.
"And if there had been a hundred lame girls—we've all been young once!"
Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch's respectfulness to his mother was enlarged upon. Various virtues were discovered in him. People talked with approbation of the learning he had acquired in the four years he had spent in German universities.
Gaganov's conduct was declared utterly tactless: "not knowing friend from foe." Yulia Mihailovna's keen insight was unhesitatingly admitted.
So by the time Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch made his appearance among them he was received by every one with naive solemnity. In all eyes fastened upon him could be read eager anticipation.
Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch at once wrapped himself in the most austere silence, which, of course, gratified every one much more than if he had talked till doomsday.
In a word, he was a success, he was the fashion.
If once one has figured in provincial society, there's no retreating into the background.
Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch began to fulfil all his social duties in the province punctiliously as before.
He was not found cheerful company: "a man who has seen suffering; a man not like other people; he has something to be melancholy about."
Even the pride and disdainful aloofness for which he had been so detested four years before was now liked and respected.
Varvara Petrovna was triumphant.
I don't know whether she grieved much over the shattering of her dreams concerning Lizaveta Nikolaevna.
Family pride, of course, helped her to get over it.
One thing was strange: Varvara Petrovna was suddenly convinced that Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch really had "made his choice" at Count K.'s. And what was strangest of all, she was led to believe it by rumours which reached her on no better authority than other people. She was afraid to ask Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch a direct question.
Two or three times, however, she could not refrain from slyly and good-humouredly reproaching him for not being open with her. Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch smiled and remained silent.
The silence was taken as a sign of assent.
And yet, all the time she never forgot the cripple.
The thought of her lay like a stone on her heart, a nightmare, she was tortured by strange misgivings and surmises, and all this at the same time as she dreamed of Count K.'s daughters.
But of this we shall speak later.
Varvara Petrovna began again, of course, to be treated with extreme deference and respect in society, but she took little advantage of it and went out rarely.
She did, however, pay a visit of ceremony to the governor's wife.
Of course, no one had been more charmed and delighted by Yulia Mihailovna's words spoken at the marshal's soiree than she. They lifted a load of care off her heart, and had at once relieved much of the distress she had been suffering since that luckless Sunday.
"I misunderstood that woman," she declared, and with her characteristic impulsiveness she frankly told Yulia Mihailovna that she had come to thank her. Yulia Mihailovna was flattered, but she behaved with dignity.
She was beginning about this time to be very conscious of her own importance, too much so, in fact.
She announced, for example, in the course of conversation, that she had never heard of Stepan Trofimovitch as a leading man or a savant.
"I know young Verhovensky, of course, and make much of him.
He's imprudent, but then he's young; he's thoroughly well-informed, though.
He's not an out-of-date, old-fashioned critic, anyway."
Varvara Petrovna hastened to observe that Stepan Trofimovitch had never been a critic, but had, on the contrary, spent all his life in her house.
He was renowned through circumstances of his early career, "only too well known to the whole world," and of late for his researches in Spanish history. Now he intended to write also on the position of modern German universities, and, she believed, something about the Dresden Madonna too.
In short, Varvara Petrovna refused to surrender Stepan Trofimovitch to the tender mercies of Yulia Mihailovna.
"The Dresden Madonna?
You mean the Sistine Madonna?
Chere Varvara Petrovna, I spent two hours sitting before that picture and came away utterly disillusioned.
I could make nothing of it and was in complete amazement.
Karmazinov, too, says it's hard to understand it.
They all see nothing in it now, Russians and English alike.
All its fame is just the talk of the last generation."
"Fashions are changed then?"
"What I think is that one mustn't despise our younger generation either.
They cry out that they're communists, but what I say is that we must appreciate them and mustn't be hard on them.