“Funny girl, Aglaya,” she observed, after a pause. “When she left me she said, ‘Give my special and personal respects to your parents; I shall certainly find an opportunity to see your father one day,’ and so serious over it. She’s a strange creature.”
“Wasn’t she joking? She was speaking sarcastically!”
“Not a bit of it; that’s just the strange part of it.”
“Does she know about father, do you think—or not?”
“That they do not know about it in the house is quite certain, the rest of them, I mean; but you have given me an idea. Aglaya perhaps knows. She alone, though, if anyone; for the sisters were as astonished as I was to hear her speak so seriously. If she knows, the prince must have told her.”
“Oh! it’s not a great matter to guess who told her. A thief! A thief in our family, and the head of the family, too!”
“Oh! nonsense!” cried Varia, angrily. “That was nothing but a drunkard’s tale. Nonsense! Why, who invented the whole thing—Lebedeff and the prince—a pretty pair! Both were probably drunk.”
“Father is a drunkard and a thief; I am a beggar, and the husband of my sister is a usurer,” continued Gania, bitterly. “There was a pretty list of advantages with which to enchant the heart of Aglaya.”
“That same husband of your sister, the usurer—”
“Feeds me? Go on. Don’t stand on ceremony, pray.”
“Don’t lose your temper. You are just like a schoolboy. You think that all this sort of thing would harm you in Aglaya’s eyes, do you? You little know her character. She is capable of refusing the most brilliant party, and running away and starving in a garret with some wretched student;