You can imagine after that how hysterical the nervous outbursts of this most innocent of all fifty-year-old infants could become! I once read one of these letters, after some quarrel between them, venomously acted out, though the cause was a trifling one. I was horrified and implored him not to send the letter.

"Impossible. . honor. . duty . . I shall die if I do not confess everything to her, everything!" he answered all but deliriously, and he did send the letter.

And here lay the difference between them—Varvara Petrovna would never have sent such a letter. True, he loved writing to distraction, wrote to her even while living in the same house, and on hysterical occasions even two letters a day. I know positively that she always read these letters in a most attentive way, even in the event of two letters a day, and, having read them, lay them away in a special drawer, marked and sorted; what's more, she laid them up in her heart. Then, having kept her friend all day without an answer, she would meet him as if nothing had happened, as if nothing special had taken place the day before. She gradually drilled him so well that he himself did not dare to remind her of the previous day and only kept peeking into her eyes for some time. But she forgot nothing, and he sometimes forgot much too quickly, and, often that same day, encouraged by her composure, would laugh and frolic over the champagne, if friends stopped by. What venom there must have been in her eyes at those moments, yet he noticed nothing! Maybe after a week, or a month, or even half a year, at some special moment, having chanced to recall some expression from such a letter, and then the whole letter with all its circumstances, he would suddenly burn with shame, and suffered so much that he would come down with one of his attacks of cholerine. These special attacks of his, resembling cholerine, were on certain occasions the usual outcome of his nervous shocks and represented a certain rather interesting peculiarity of his organism. Indeed, Varvara Petrovna undoubtedly and quite frequently hated him; but there was one thing he failed to notice in her to the very end, that for her he finally became her son, her creation, even, one might say, her invention, became flesh of her flesh, and that she maintained and sustained him not at all out of "envy of his talents" alone. And how insulted she must have been by such suppositions! Some unbearable love for him lay hidden in her, in the midst of constant hatred, jealousy, and contempt. She protected him from every speck of dust, fussed over him for twentytwo years, would lie awake whole nights from worry if his reputation as a poet, scholar, or civic figure were in question. She invented him, and she was the first to believe in her invention. He was something like a sort of dream of hers. . But for that she indeed demanded a lot of him, sometimes even slavery. And she was incredibly resentful. Here, incidentally, I will relate two anecdotes.

DEMONS

Part One

IV

Once, back in the time of the first rumors about the emancipation of the serfs, 11 when the whole of Russia suddenly became exultant and all ready to be reborn, Varvara Petrovna was visited by a traveling Petersburg baron, a man with the highest connections and who stood quite close to these matters. Varvara Petrovna greatly valued such visits, because her connections with high society had grown weaker and weaker since her husband's death, and finally had ceased altogether. The baron stayed for an hour and had tea. No one else was there, but Varvara Petrovna invited Stepan Trofimovich and put him on display.