“Why has this happened?”

“If only you knew how miserable I am!” she said, wringing her hands.

“What is it?” he said, going up to her, wringing his hands too.  “My dear, for God’s sake, tell me—­what is it?  Only tell the truth, I entreat you—­nothing but the truth!”

“Don’t pay any attention to it,” she said, and forced herself to smile.  “I promise you I’ll be a faithful, devoted wife. . . .  Come this evening.”

Sitting afterwards with his sister and reading aloud an historical novel, he recalled it all and felt wounded that his splendid, pure, rich feeling was met with such a shallow response.  He was not loved, but his offer had been accepted—­in all probability because he was rich:  that is, what was thought most of in him was what he valued least of all in himself.  It was quite possible that Yulia, who was so pure and believed in God, had not once thought of his money; but she did not love him—­did not love him, and evidently she had interested motives, vague, perhaps, and not fully thought out—­still, it was so.  The doctor’s house with its common furniture was repulsive to him, and he looked upon the doctor himself as a wretched, greasy miser, a sort of operatic Gaspard from “Les Cloches de Corneville.”  The very name “Yulia” had a vulgar sound.  He imagined how he and his Yulia would stand at their wedding, in reality complete strangers to one another, without a trace of feeling on her side, just as though their marriage had been made by a professional matchmaker; and the only consolation left him now, as commonplace as the marriage itself, was the reflection that he was not the first, and would not be the last; that thousands of people were married like that; and that with time, when Yulia came to know him better, she would perhaps grow fond of him.

“Romeo and Juliet!” he said, as he shut the novel, and he laughed.  “I am Romeo, Nina.  You may congratulate me.  I made an offer to Yulia Byelavin to-day.”

Nina Fyodorovna thought he was joking, but when she believed it, she began to cry; she was not pleased at the news.

“Well, I congratulate you,” she said.  “But why is it so sudden?”

“No, it’s not sudden.  It’s been going on since March, only you don’t notice anything. . . .  I fell in love with her last March when I made her acquaintance here, in your rooms.”

“I thought you would marry some one in our Moscow set,” said Nina Fyodorovna after a pause.  “Girls in our set are simpler.  But what matters, Alyosha, is that you should be happy—­that matters most.  My Grigory Nikolaitch did not love me, and there’s no concealing it; you can see what our life is.  Of course any woman may love you for your goodness and your brains, but, you see, Yulitchka is a girl of good family from a high-class boarding-school; goodness and brains are not enough for her.  She is young, and, you, Alyosha, are not so young, and are not good-looking.”