had become rooted in him.  He did not know how to comport himself towards his fellow-men; at the age of twenty-three, with an eager longing after love in his bashful heart, he had not yet dared to look a woman in the face.  With his clear and logical, but rather sluggish intellect, with his stubbornness, and his tendency towards inactivity and contemplation, he ought to have been flung at an early age into the whirl of life, instead of which he had been deliberately kept in seclusion.  And now the magic circle was broken, but he remained standing on the same spot, cramped in mind and self-absorbed.

At his age it seemed a little ridiculous to put on the uniform of a student[A], but he did not fear ridicule.  His Spartan education had at all events been so far useful, inasmuch as it had developed in him a contempt for the world’s gossiping.  So he donned a student’s uniform without being disconcerted, enrolling himself in the faculty of physical and mathematical science.  His robust figure, his ruddy face, his sprouting beard, his taciturn manner, produced a singular impression on his comrades.  They never suspected that under the rough exterior of this man, who attended the lectures so regularly, driving up in a capacious rustic sledge, drawn by a couple of horses, something almost childlike was concealed.  They thought him an eccentric sort of pedant, and they made no advances towards him, being able to do very well without him.  And he, for his part, avoided them.  During the first two years he passed at the university, he became intimate with no one except the student from whom she took lessons in Latin.  This student, whose name was Mikhalevich, an enthusiast, and somewhat of a poet, grew warmly attached to Lavretsky, and quite accidentally became the cause of a serious change in his fortunes.

[Footnote A:  The students at the Russian universities used to wear a uniform, but they no longer do so.]

One evening, when Lavretsky was at the theatre—­he never missed a single representation, for Mochalof was then at the summit of his glory—­he caught sight of a young girl in a box on the first tier.  Never before had his heart beaten so fast, though at that time no woman ever passed before his stern eyes without sending its pulses flying.  Leaning on the velvet border of the box, the girl sat very still.  Youthful animation lighted up every feature of her beautiful face; artistic feeling shone in her lovely eyes, which looked out with a soft, attentive gaze from underneath delicately pencilled eyebrows, in the quick smile of her expressive lips, in the bearing of her head, her arms, her neck.  As to her dress, it was exquisite.  By her side sat a sallow, wrinkled woman of five-and-forty, wearing a low dress and a black cap, with an unmeaning smile on her vacant face, to which she strove to give an aspect of attention.  In the background of the box appeared an elderly man in a roomy coat, and with a high cravat.  His small eyes had an expression of stupid conceit, modified by a kind of cringing suspicion; his mustache and whiskers were dyed, he had an immense meaningless forehead, and flabby cheeks:  his whole appearance was that of a retired general.