It has always seemed to me that wealth is felt, and that the rich must have special feelings unknown to the poor.  Often as I passed by Nadyezhda Lvovna’s big fruit garden, in which stood the large, heavy house with its windows always curtained, I thought:  “What is she thinking at this moment?  Is there happiness behind those blinds?” and so on.  Once I saw her from a distance in a fine light cabriolet, driving a handsome white horse, and, sinful man that I am, I not only envied her, but even thought that in her poses, in her movements, there was something special, not to be found in people who are not rich, just as persons of a servile nature succeed in discovering “good family” at the first glance in people of the most ordinary exterior, if they are a little more distinguished than themselves.  Nadyezhda Lvovna’s inner life was only known to me by scandal.  It was said in the district that five or six years ago, before she was married, during her father’s lifetime, she had been passionately in love with Prince Sergey Ivanitch, who was now beside me in the chaise.  The prince had been fond of visiting her father, and used to spend whole days in his billiard room, where he played pyramids indefatigably till his arms and legs ached.  Six months before the old man’s death he had suddenly given up visiting the Shabelskys.  The gossip of the district having no positive facts to go upon explained this abrupt change in their relations in various ways.  Some said that the prince, having observed the plain daughter’s feeling for him and being unable to reciprocate it, considered it the duty of a gentleman to cut short his visits.  Others maintained that old Shabelsky had discovered why his daughter was pining away, and had proposed to the poverty-stricken prince that he should marry her; the prince, imagining in his narrow-minded way that they were trying to buy him together with his title, was indignant, said foolish things, and quarrelled with them.  What was true and what was false in this nonsense was difficult to say.  But that there was a portion of truth in it was evident, from the fact that the prince always avoided conversation about Nadyezhda Lvovna.

I knew that soon after her father’s death Nadyezhda Lvovna had married one Kandurin, a bachelor of law, not wealthy, but adroit, who had come on a visit to the neighbourhood.  She married him not from love, but because she was touched by the love of the legal gentleman who, so it was said, had cleverly played the love-sick swain.  At the time I am describing, Kandurin was for some reason living in Cairo, and writing thence to his friend, the marshal of the district, “Notes of Travel,” while she sat languishing behind lowered blinds, surrounded by idle parasites, and whiled away her dreary days in petty philanthropy.

On the way to the house the prince fell to talking.

“It’s three days since I have been at home,” he said in a half whisper, with a sidelong glance at the driver.  “I am not a child, nor a silly woman, and I have no prejudices, but I can’t stand the bailiffs.  When I see a bailiff in my house I turn pale and tremble, and even have a twitching in the calves of my legs.  Do you know Rogozhin refused to honour my note?”