goodness and impressionableness; but just then even Márya Nikoláevna was delighted to see his unwonted dignity, and Sónya Petróvna smiled with her eyes, as she looked at him. They arrived at the house of Márya Ivánovna. Márya Ivánovna was Peter Ivánovich’s godmother and ten years his senior. She was an old maid.
Her history, why she did not get married, and how she had passed her youth, I will tell some time later.
She had lived uninterruptedly for forty years in Moscow. She had neither much intelligence, nor great wealth, and she did not think much of connections—on the contrary; and there was not a man who did not respect her. She was so convinced that everybody ought to respect her that everybody actually respected her. There were some young liberals from the university who did not recognize her power, but these gentlemen made a bold front only in her absence. She needed only to enter the drawing-room with her royal gait, to say something in her calm manner, to smile her kindly smile, and they were vanquished. Her society consisted of everybody. She looked upon all of Moscow as her home folk, and treated them as such. She had friends mostly among the young people and clever men, but women she did not like. She had also dependents, whom our literature has for some reason included with the Hungarian woman and with generals in one common class for contempt; but Márya Ivánovna considered it better for Skópin, who had been ruined in cards, and Madame Byéshev, whom her husband had driven away, to be living with her than in misery, and so she kept them.
But the two great passions in Márya Ivánovna’s present life were her two brothers. Peter Ivánovich was her idol. Prince Iván was hateful to her. She had not known that Peter Ivánovich had arrived; she had attended mass, and was just finishing her coffee.
At the table sat the vicar of Moscow, Madame Byéshev, and Skópin. Márya Ivánovna was telling them about young Count V⸺, the son of