positively born with his nerves overwrought. The violence of his desires he took for strength. His passionate craving to distinguish himself sometimes led him to the brink of most ill-considered actions, but our hero was always at the last moment too sensible to take the final plunge. That drove him to despair. He could perhaps have made up his mind to anything extremely base to attain what he dreamed of. But as fate would have it, he always turned out to be too honest for any great meanness. (Small meannesses he was, however, prepared for.) He looked with loathing and hatred on the downfall and poverty of his family. He treated even his mother haughtily and contemptuously, though he knew perfectly well that his mother’s reputation and character were the pivot on which his future rested.
When he entered General Epanchin’s house he said to himself at once, “Since I must be mean, let me be so thoroughly, if only I win my game” — and was scarcely ever thoroughly mean. And why should he imagine that he would certainly need to be mean? Of Aglaia he was simply frightened at the time, but he kept on with her on the off-chance, though he never seriously believed that she would stoop to him. Afterwards, at the time of his affair with Nastasya Filippovna, he suddenly imagined that money would be the means of attaining everything. “If I must be mean, well then I will,” he repeated to himself every day with satisfaction, but with a certain dismay. “If one must be mean, let us be first-rate at it,” he urged himself continually. “Commonplace people are afraid to be, but lam not.”
Losing Aglaia and crushed by circumstances, he completely lost heart, and actually brought Myshkin the money flung him by a mad woman to whom it had been given by a madman. A thousand times afterwards he regretted having returned that money, though he was continually priding himself upon it. He did actually shed tears for three days while Myshkin was in Petersburg; but in those three days he grew to hate the prince because the latter looked at him too compassionately, though “not every one would have had the strength” for such a deed as returning that money. But the frank confession to himself that his misery was due to nothing but the continual mortification of his vanity distressed him horribly.
Only long afterwards he saw and realised what a different ending an affair with such a strange and innocent creature as Aglaia might have had. He was consumed by regrets; he threw up his post and sank into despondency and dejection. He lived with his father and mother in Ptitsyn’s house and at the latter’s expense, and openly despised Ptitsyn, although he followed his advice and had the sense almost always to ask it. Gavril Ardalionovitch was angry, for instance, with Ptitsyn for not aiming at becoming a Rothschild. “If you go in for usury, do it thoroughly — squeeze people, coin money out of them, show will-power, be a king among the Jews.”
Ptitsyn was unassuming and quiet; he did nothing but smile. But once he thought it necessary to have a serious explanation with Ganya, and he carried out the task with a certain degree of dignity. He had proved to Ganya that he was doing nothing dishonest and that he had no right to call him a grasping Jew; that it was not his fault that money was so valuable; that he was acting honestly and justly,
and that in reality he was only an intermediary in these affairs, and that finally, thanks to his accuracy in business, he was already favourably known to first-rate people and his business was increasing. “I shall never be a Rothschild, and I don’t want to be,” he said, smiling; “but I shall have a house in Liteyny, perhaps two even, and there I shall stop.”
“And who knows, perhaps even three,” he thought to himself, but he never uttered this aloud, he concealed that day-dream.
Nature loves such people and is kind to them; she will reward Ptitsyn not with three but with four houses, and just because he has realised from childhood that he will never become a Rothschild. But beyond four houses nature will not go, and Ptitsyn’s success will end there.
Gavril Ardalionovitch’s sister was quite a different person. She too was possessed with strong desires, but they were rather persistent than impulsive. She had plenty of common-sense in emergencies, and was not devoid of it indeed in everyday life. It is true that she also was one of the ordinary people who dream of being original; yet she very soon found out that she had no particular originality, and did not take it too much to heart, perhaps — who knows? — from pride of a sort. She took her first practical step with great decision in marrying Ptitsyn. But in getting married she did not say to herself, “If I must be mean, I will be mean so long as I gain my end,” as her brother Ganya would certainly have said to himself, and may possibly have said aloud to her, when he gave his approval as elder brother to the match. Quite the contrary, in fact: Varvara Ardalionovna married after having convinced herself that her future husband was a pleasant, unassuming, almost educated man, who could never be induced to do anything very dishonourable. As for minor acts of meanness, Varvara Ardalionovna did not worry about such trifles; and, in fact, one can find such trifles everywhere. It’s no good looking for an ideal being! She knew, besides, that by marrying she would provide a refuge for her mother, her father and her brothers. Seeing her brother in trouble, she wanted to help him in spite of all their previous misunderstandings.
Ptitsyn sometimes urged Ganya, in a friendly way, of course, to take another post. “You despise qenerals and beinq a qeneral,” he would sav to him sometimes in joke; “but mind, ‘they will all finish by being generals; if you live long enough you will see.”
“But what makes them think that I despise generals and being a general?” Ganya thought ironically to himself.
For her brother’s sake Varvara Ardalionovna made up her mind to enlarge her circle of acquaintance. She managed to get a footing at the Epanchins’. The memories of childhood stood her in good stead there, for she and Ganya had played with the Epanchins as children. We may observe here that if Varvara Ardalionovna had visited the Epanchins in pursuit of some fantastic dream, by that very fact she would have excluded herself from that class of people with whom she mentally ranked herself. But she was not pursuing a dream; she was working on a fairly firm basis: she was reckoning on the peculiarities of the Epanchin family. She was never tired of studying Aglaia’s character. The task she set before herself was to bring those two, Aglaia and her brother, together again. Possibly she actually did attain this object to some extent; possibly she made blunders, building perhaps too much on her brother and expecting from him what he could not under any circumstances have given. In any case she behaved with considerable art at the Epanchins’: for weeks together she made no allusion to her brother; she was always extremely truthful and sincere; she behaved simply but with dignity. As for the depths of her conscience, she was not afraid to look into them, and she did not reproach herself for anything in the least. It was that that gave her power. There was only one thing she noticed in herself, that she too was spiteful; that she too had a great deal of amour propre, and one might almost say of mortified vanity. She noticed it particularly at certain moments, especially almost every time she was walking home from the Epanchins’.
And just now she was on her way back from them, and, as we have said already, she was dejected and preoccupied. A shade of bitter mockery was apparent in her dejection. At Pavlovsk Ptitsyn occupied a roomy but not very attractive-looking house in a dusty street, which would within a short period become his own property; so that he was already negotiating for the sale of it. As she was going up the steps, Varvara Ardalionovna heard an extraordinary noise from upstairs and caught the voices of her father and brother shouting at one another. Going to the drawing-room and seeing Ganya running to and fro, white with fury and almost tearing his hair, she frowned and, with a weary air, sank on the sofa without taking off her hat. Knowing that if she let a minute pass without asking her brother why he was in such a state, he would certainly be angry with her, Varya hastened to observe, in the form of a question:
“The usual story?”
“The usual story indeed!” cried Ganya. “The usual story! No! The devil only knows what is happening here, it’s not the same as usual. The old man is getting perfectly frantic. . . . Mother’s in floods of tears. Upon my word, Varya, I’ll turn him out, say what you like, or… or I’ll go away myself,” he added, probably recollecting that it was not possible to turn anyone out of another person’s house.
“You must make allowances,” murmured Varya.
“What allowances? For whom?” cried Ganya, firing up. “For his filthy habits? No, you may say what you like, that’s impossible. Impossible, impossible, impossible! And what a wav to behave: he is in fault,
and it makes him