“It is wonderful,” he said, “that you have come just at this moment; but I know all, I know all.”

“You know all?” Lavretsky repeated in amazement.

“You have heard me,” replied Lemm, “did you not understand that I knew all?”

Till daybreak Lavretsky could not sleep, all night he was sitting on his bed.  And Lisa too did not sleep; she was praying.

Chapter XXXV

The reader knows how Lavretsky grew up and developed.  Let us say a few words about Lisa’s education.  She was in her tenth year when her father died; but he had not troubled himself much about her.  Weighed down with business cares, for ever anxious for the increase of his property, bilious, sharp and impatient, he gave money unsparingly for the teachers, tutors, dress and other necessities of his children; but he could not endure, as he expressed it, “to be dandling his squallers,” and indeed had no time to dandle them.  He worked, took no rest from business, slept little, rarely played cards, and worked again.  He compared himself to a horse harnessed to a threshing-machine.  “My life has soon come to an end,” was his comment on his deathbed, with a bitter smile on his parched lips.  Marya Dmitrievna did not in reality trouble herself about Lisa any more than her husband, though she had boasted to Lavretsky that she alone had educated her children.  She dressed her up like a doll, stroked her on the head before visitors and called her a clever child and a darling to her face, and that was all.  Any kind of continuous care was too exhausting for the indolent lady.  During her father’s lifetime, Lisa was in the hands of a governess, Mademoiselle Moreau from Paris, after his death she passed into the charge of Marfa Timofyevna.  Marfa Timofyevna the reader knows already; Mademoiselle Moreau was a tiny wrinkled creature with little bird-like ways and a bird’s intellect.  In her youth she had led a very dissipated life, but in old age she had only two passions left—­gluttony and cards.  When she had eaten her fill, and was neither playing cards nor chattering, her face assumed an expression almost death-like.  She was sitting, looking, breathing—­yet it was clear that there was not an idea in her head.  One could not even call her good-natured.  Birds are not good-natured.  Either as a result of her frivolous youth or of the air of Paris, which she had breathed from childhood, a kind of cheap universal scepticism had found its way into her, usually expressed by the words:  tout ca c’est des betises.  She spoke ungrammatically, but in a pure Parisian jargon, did not talk scandal and had no caprices—­what more can one desire in a governess?  Over Lisa she had little influence; all the stronger was the influence on her of her nurse, Agafya Vlasyevna.