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Updated: August 8, 2024
"If my request be out of season, please forgive me. But I must state it." "What is it?" "There is a man, Gurkevitch, kept in prison under your jurisdiction. His mother asks to be permitted to visit him, or, at least to send him books." The general expressed neither satisfaction nor dissatisfaction at Nekhludoff's request, but, inclining his head to one side, seemed to reflect.
Nekhludoff was about to open the letters, when a middle-aged woman, with a lace head-gear over her unevenly parted hair, glided into the room. This was Agrippina Petrovna, servant of his mother, who died in this very house. She was now stewardess to the son. Agrippina Petrovna had traveled many years abroad with Nekhludoff's mother, and had acquired the manners of a lady.
When the latter turned away, she quickly stretched forth her hand, seized the money from Nekhludoff's hand and stuck it behind her belt. "How funny!" she said, smiling contemptuously as it seemed to him. Nekhludoff saw that there was something inimical to him in her, which stood guard, as it were, over her as she was now, and prevented him from penetrating into her heart.
Nikitin, who, as usual, stood for severity and for strict formality, was against it. The whole case, then, depended on Skovorodnikoff's vote. And his vote was thrown against a reversal, principally for the reason that Nekhludoff's determination to marry the girl on moral grounds was extremely repugnant to him.
"Ah, very glad you came! Take a seat! We are still at the fish," chewing carefully with his false teeth old Korchagin said, lifting his bloodshot eyes on Nekhludoff. "Stepan!" he turned with a full mouth to the fat, majestic servant, pointing with his eyes to Nekhludoff's plate.
His aunts in holiday attire, the doctor and a neighbor were taking lunch standing. Everything was as usual, but a storm raged in Nekhludoff's soul. He did not understand what was said to him, his answers were inappropriate, and he was thinking only of Katiousha, recalling the sensation of the last kiss he gave her when he overtook her in the corridor. He could think of nothing else.
And, suddenly, he understood that the aversion he had lately, and particularly to-day, felt for everybody the Prince and Sophia Vasilievna and Corney and Missy was an aversion for himself. And, strange to say, in this acknowledgement of his baseness there was something painful yet joyful and quieting. More than once in Nekhludoff's life there had been what he called a "cleansing of the soul."
All the spectators in the circle of boxes sitting and standing, gray-haired, bald and pomaded heads were intently following the movements of a slim actress making wry faces and in an unnatural voice reading a monologue. Some one hissed when the door was opened, and two streams of cold and warm air were wafted on Nekhludoff's face.
The day before, Nekhludoff's sister and her husband came to town to see him. Nekhludoff's sister, Nathalie Ivanovna Rogozhinsky, was 10 years older than her brother. She had been very fond of him when he was a boy, and later on, just before her marriage, they grew very close to each other, as if they were equals, she being a young woman of 25, he a lad of 15.
"What faces he makes!" the lawyer's wife said of him, when he had left the room. In the reception-room the clerk handed him the petition, and in answer to Nekhludoff's question about the honorarium, said that Anatal Semionovitch set his fee at a thousand rubles; that he really does not take such cases, but does it for Nekhludoff. "And who is to sign the petition?" asked Nekhludoff.
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