I'll soon find myself work and earn a little something. Let's take an apartment and live together, you, me, and Ippolit, the three of us; and we can invite the general to visit."
"With the greatest pleasure.
We'll see, though.
Right now I'm very . . . very upset.
What?
We're there already?
In this house . . . what a magnificent entrance!
And a doorkeeper!
Well, Kolya, I don't know what will come of it."
The prince stood there like a lost man.
"You'll tell me about it tomorrow!
Don't be too shy.
God grant you success, because I share your convictions in everything!
Goodbye.
I'll go back now and tell Ippolit about it.
And you'll be received, there's no doubt of that, don't worry!
She's terribly original.
This stairway, second floor, the doorkeeper will show you!"
XIII
The prince was very worried as he went upstairs and tried as hard as he could to encourage himself.
"The worst thing," he thought, "will be if they don't receive me and think something bad about me, or perhaps receive me and start laughing in my face . . . Ah, never mind!"
And, in fact, it was not very frightening; but the question: "What would he do there and why was he going?"— to this question he was decidedly unable to find a reassuring answer.
Even if it should be possible in some way to seize an opportunity and tell Nastasya Filippovna:
"Don't marry this man and don't ruin yourself, he doesn't love you, he loves your money, he told me so himself, and Aglaya Epanchin told me, and I've come to tell you"— it would hardly come out right in all respects.
Yet another unresolved question emerged, and such a major one that the prince was even afraid to think about it, could not and dared not even admit it, did not know how to formulate it, and blushed and trembled at the very thought of it.
But in the end, despite all these anxieties and doubts, he still went in and asked for Nastasya Filippovna.
Nastasya Filippovna occupied a not very large but indeed magnificently decorated apartment.
There had been a time, at the beginning of those five years of her Petersburg life, when Afanasy Ivanovich had been particularly unstinting of money for her; he was then still counting on her love and thought he could seduce her mainly by comfort and luxury, knowing how easily the habits of luxury take root and how hard it is to give them up later, when luxury has gradually turned into necessity.
In this case Totsky remained true to the good old traditions, changing nothing in them, and showing a boundless respect for the invincible power of sensual influences.
Nastasya Filippovna did not reject the luxury, even liked it, but—and this seemed extremely strange—never succumbed to it, as if she could always do without it; she even tried several times to declare as much, which always struck Totsky unpleasantly.
However, there was much in Nastasya Filippovna that struck Afanasy Ivanovich unpleasantly (later even to the point of scorn).
Not to mention the inelegance of the sort of people she occasionally received, and was therefore inclined to receive, into her intimate circle, there could also be glimpsed in her certain utterly strange inclinations: there appeared a sort of barbaric mixture of two tastes, an ability to get along and be satisfied with things and ways the very existence of which, it seemed, would be unthinkable for a decent and finely cultivated person.
Indeed, to give an example, if Nastasya Filippovna had suddenly displayed some charming and graceful ignorance, such as, for instance, that peasant women could not wear cambric undergarments such as she wore, Afanasy Ivanovich would probably have been extremely pleased with it.
This was the result towards which Nastasya Filippovna's entire education had originally been aimed, according to Totsky's program, for he was a great connoisseur in that line; but alas! the results turned out to be strange.
In spite of that, there nevertheless was and remained in Nastasya Filippovna something that occasionally struck even Afanasy Ivanovich himself by its extraordinary and fascinating originality, by some sort of power, and enchanted him on occasion even now, when all his former expectations with regard to Nastasya Filippovna had fallen through.
The prince was received by a maid (Nastasya Filippovna always kept female servants), who, to his surprise, listened to his request to be announced without any perplexity.
Neither his dirty boots, nor his broad-brimmed hat, nor his sleeveless cloak, nor his embarrassed look caused the slightest hesitation in her.
She helped him off with his cloak, asked him to wait in the front hall, and went at once to announce him.
The company that had gathered at Nastasya Filippovna's consisted of her most usual and habitual acquaintances.
There were even rather few people compared with previous years' gatherings on the same day.
Present first and foremost were Afanasy Ivanovich Totsky and Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin; both were amiable, but both were in some repressed anxiety on account of the poorly concealed expectation of the promised announcement about Ganya.
Besides them, naturally, there was Ganya as well—also very gloomy, very pensive, and even almost totally "unamiable"—who for the most part stood to one side, separately, and kept silent.
He had not ventured to bring Varya, but Nastasya Filippovna made no mention of her; instead, as soon as she greeted Ganya, she reminded him of the scene with the prince.
The general, who had not heard about it yet, began to show interest.
Then Ganya drily, restrainedly, but with perfect frankness, told everything that had happened earlier, and how he had already gone to the prince to apologize.
With that he warmly voiced his opinion that the prince, quite strangely and for God knows what reason, was called an idiot, that he thought completely the opposite of him, and that he was most certainly a man who kept his own counsel.
Nastasya Filippovna listened to this opinion with great attention and followed Ganya curiously, but the conversation immediately switched to Rogozhin, who had taken such a major part in that day's story and in whom Afanasy Ivanovich and Ivan Fyodorovich also began to take an extremely curious interest.
It turned out that specific information about Rogozhin could be supplied by Ptitsyn, who had been hard at work on his business until nearly nine o'clock that evening.
Rogozhin had insisted with all his might that he should get hold of a hundred thousand roubles that same day.
"True, he was drunk," Ptitsyn observed with that, "but, difficult as it is, it seems he'll get the hundred thousand, only I don't know if it will be today and the whole of it. Many people are working on it—Kinder, Trepalov, Biskup; he's offering any interest they like, though, of course, it's all from drink and in his initial joy . . ." Ptitsyn concluded.