Don't pay his debts ever.
If once you pay them, you'll never be free of them.
Besides, I shall always be here.
You shall have twelve hundred roubles a year from me, with extras, fifteen hundred, besides board and lodging, which shall be at my expense, just as he has it now.
Only you must set up your own servants.
Your yearly allowance shall be paid to you all at once straight into your hands.
But be kind, and sometimes give him something, and let his friends come to see him once a week, but if they come more often, turn them out.
But I shall be here, too.
And if I die, your pension will go on till his death, do you hear, till his death, for it's his pension, not yours.
And besides the seven thousand you'll have now, which you ought to keep untouched if you're not foolish, I'll leave you another eight thousand in my will.
And you'll get nothing more than that from me, it's right that you should know it.
Come, you consent, eh?
Will you say something at last?"
"I have told you already, Varvara Petrovna."
"Remember that you're free to decide. As you like, so it shall be."
"Then, may I ask, Varvara Petrovna, has Stepan Trofimovitch said anything yet?"
"No, he hasn't said anything, he doesn't know... but he will speak directly."
She jumped up at once and threw on a black shawl.
Dasha flushed a little again, and watched her with questioning eyes.
Varvara Petrovna turned suddenly to her with a face flaming with anger.
"You're a fool!" She swooped down on her like a hawk. "An ungrateful fool!
What's in your mind?
Can you imagine that I'd compromise you, in any way, in the smallest degree.
Why, he shall crawl on his knees to ask you, he must be dying of happiness, that's how it shall be arranged.
Why, you know that I'd never let you suffer.
Or do you suppose he'll take you for the sake of that eight thousand, and that I'm hurrying off to sell you?
You're a fool, a fool! You're all ungrateful fools.
Give me my umbrella!"
And she flew off to walk by the wet brick pavements and the wooden planks to Stepan Trofimovitch's.
VII
It was true that she would never have let Dasha suffer; on the contrary, she considered now that she was acting as her benefactress.
The most generous and legitimate indignation was glowing in her soul, when, as she put on her shawl, she caught fixed upon her the embarrassed and mistrustful eyes of her protegee.
She had genuinely loved the girl from her childhood upwards.
Praskovya Ivanovna had with justice called Darya Pavlovna her favourite.
Long ago Varvara Petrovna had made up her mind once for all that
"Darya's disposition was not like her brother's" (not, that is, like Ivan Shatov's), that she was quiet and gentle, and capable of great self-sacrifice; that she was distinguished by a power of devotion, unusual modesty, rare reasonableness, and, above all, by gratitude.
Till that time Dasha had, to all appearances, completely justified her expectations.
"In that life there will be no mistakes," said Varvara Petrovna when the girl was only twelve years old, and as it was characteristic of her to attach herself doggedly and passionately to any dream that fascinated her, any new design, any idea that struck her as noble, she made up her mind at once to educate Dasha as though she were her own daughter.
She at once set aside a sum of money for her, and sent for a governess, Miss Criggs, who lived with them until the girl was sixteen, but she was for some reason suddenly dismissed.
Teachers came for her from the High School, among them a real Frenchman, who taught Dasha French.
He, too, was suddenly dismissed, almost turned out of the house.
A poor lady, a widow of good family, taught her to play the piano.
Yet her chief tutor was Stepan Trofimovitch.
In reality he first discovered Dasha. He began teaching the quiet child even before Varvara Petrovna had begun to think about her.
I repeat again, it was wonderful how children took to him.
Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushin had been taught by him from the age of eight till eleven (Stepan Trofimovitch took no fees, of course, for his lessons, and would not on any account have taken payment from the Drozdovs).
But he fell in love with the charming child and used to tell her poems of a sort about the creation of the world, about the earth, and the history of humanity.
His lectures about the primitive peoples and primitive man were more interesting than the Arabian Nights.
Liza, who was ecstatic over these stories, used to mimic Stepan Trofimovitch very funnily at home.
He heard of this and once peeped in on her unawares.