Above all I was afraid of being carried away.  Whether I was walking along the street, or working, or talking to the other fellows, I was all the time thinking of one thing only, of going in the evening to see Mariya Viktorovna and was picturing her voice, her laugh, her movements.  When I was getting ready to go to her I always spent a long time before my nurse’s warped looking-glass, as I fastened my tie; my serge trousers were detestable in my eyes, and I suffered torments, and at the same time despised myself for being so trivial.  When she called to me out of the other room that she was not dressed and asked me to wait, I listened to her dressing; it agitated me, I felt as though the ground were giving way under my feet.  And when I saw a woman’s figure in the street, even at a distance, I invariably compared it.  It seemed to me that all our girls and women were vulgar, that they were absurdly dressed, and did not know how to hold themselves; and these comparisons aroused a feeling of pride in me:  Mariya Viktorovna was the best of them all!  And I dreamed of her and myself at night.

One evening at supper with the engineer we ate a whole lobster As I was going home afterwards I remembered that the engineer twice called me “My dear fellow” at supper, and I reflected that they treated me very kindly in that house, as they might an unfortunate big dog who had been kicked out by its owners, that they were amusing themselves with me, and that when they were tired of me they would turn me out like a dog.  I felt ashamed and wounded, wounded to the point of tears as though I had been insulted, and looking up at the sky I took a vow to put an end to all this.

The next day I did not go to the Dolzhikov’s.  Late in the evening, when it was quite dark and raining, I walked along Great Dvoryansky Street, looking up at the windows.  Everyone was asleep at the Azhogins’, and the only light was in one of the furthest windows.  It was Madame Azhogin in her own room, sewing by the light of three candles, imagining that she was combating superstition.  Our house was in darkness, but at the Dolzhikovs’, on the contrary, the windows were lighted up, but one could distinguish nothing through the flowers and the curtains.  I kept walking up and down the street; the cold March rain drenched me through.  I heard my father come home from the club; he stood knocking at the gate.  A minute later a light appeared at the window, and I saw my sister, who was hastening down with a lamp, while with the other hand she was twisting her thick hair together as she went.  Then my father walked about the drawing-room, talking and rubbing his hands, while my sister sat in a low chair, thinking and not listening to what he said.