"What made them decide that I despise generals and generalship?" Ganya thought to himself sarcastically.
To help her brother, Varvara Ardalionovna decided to widen the circle of her activities; she wormed her way in with the Epanchins, childhood memories contributing much to that end: both she and her brother had played with the Epanchin girls in childhood.
We shall note here that if, in her visits to the Epanchins, Varvara Ardalionovna had been pursuing some extraordinary dream, she might at once have left the category of people in which she had confined herself; but she was not pursuing a dream; there was even a rather well-founded calculation here on her part: it was founded on the character of this family.
Aglaya's character she studied tirelessly.
She had set herself the task of turning the two of them, her brother and Aglaya, to each other again.
It may be that she actually achieved something; it may be that she fell into error, in counting too much on her brother, for instance, and expecting something from him that he could never and in no way give.
In any case, she acted rather skillfully at the Epanchins': for weeks at a time she made no mention of her brother, was always extremely truthful and candid, bore herself simply but with dignity.
As for the depths of her conscience, she was not afraid of looking there and did not reproach herself for anything at all.
It was this that gave her strength.
There was only one thing that she sometimes noticed in herself—that she, too, was perhaps angry, that in her, too, there was a great deal of self-love and even all but pinched vanity; she noticed it especially at certain moments, almost every time she left the Epanchins'.
And now she was returning from them and, as we have already said, in rueful pensiveness.
Something bitterly mocking could also be glimpsed in this ruefulness.
Ptitsyn lived in Pavlovsk in an unattractive but roomy wooden house that stood on a dusty street and which would soon come into his full possession, so that he in turn was already beginning to sell it to someone.
Going up to the porch, Varvara Ardalionovna heard an extremely loud noise upstairs and could make out the voices of her brother and father shouting.
Going into the drawing room and seeing Ganya, who was running up and down the room, pale with fury and almost tearing his hair out, she winced and, with a weary air, lowered herself onto the sofa without taking off her hat.
Knowing very well that if she kept silent for another minute and did not ask her brother why he was running like that, he would unfailingly become angry, Varya hastened, finally, to say, in the guise of a question:
"Same as ever?"
"As ever, hah!" exclaimed Ganya. "As ever!
No, the devil knows what's going on here now, and not as ever!
The old man's getting rabid . . . mother's howling ...
By God, Varya, say what you will, I'll throw him out of the house or ... or leave myself," he added, probably recalling that he really could not throw people out of a house that was not his.
"You must be tolerant," Varya murmured.
"Tolerant of what?
Of whom?" Ganya flared up. "Of his abominations?
No, say what you will, it's impossible like this!
Impossible, impossible, impossible!
And such a manner: he's to blame and yet he swaggers even more!
'If it won't fit through the gate, knock the fence down! . . .'
Why are you sitting there like that?
You don't look yourself!"
"I look as I look," Varya answered with displeasure.
Ganya studied her more intently.
"You've been there?" he asked suddenly.
"Yes."
"Wait, they're shouting again!
What a shame, and at such a time!"
"Why such a time?
It's no special time."
Ganya looked still more intently at his sister.
"Did you find out anything?" he asked.
"Nothing unexpected, at least.
I found out that it's all true.
My husband was more right than either of us; he predicted it from the very beginning, and so it's turned out.
Where is he?"
"Not at home.
What's turned out?"
"The prince is formally her fiance, the matter's settled.
The older girls told me.
Aglaya has agreed; they've even stopped hiding it. (It was all so mysterious there till now.) Adelaida's wedding will be postponed again, so as to celebrate both weddings together, on the same day—how poetic!
Like verse!