Having arrived at the empty house, she made the round of the rooms accompanied by the faithful and ancient Alexei Yegorovich and Fomushka, a man who had seen the world and was an expert in interior decoration. Counsels and considerations began: what furniture to transfer from the town house; what objects, paintings; where to put them; how best to manage with the conservatory and the flowers; where to hang new draperies, where to set up the buffet, one buffet or two, and so on and so forth. And then, in the heat of the bustle, she suddenly decided to send the carriage for Stepan Trofimovich.

The latter had long since been informed, and was prepared, and was every day expecting precisely such a sudden invitation. As he got into the carriage, he crossed himself; his fate was to be decided. He found his friend in the great hall, on a small settee in a niche, by a small marble table, with a pencil and paper in her hands: Fomushka was measuring the height of the galleries and windows, and Varvara Petrovna herself was writing down the numbers and making marginal notes. Without interrupting her work, she nodded her head in Stepan Trofimovich's direction and, when he muttered some greeting, hastily gave him her hand and pointed, without looking, to the place beside her.

"I sat and waited for about five minutes, 'repressing my heart,’” he told me later. "The woman I saw was not the one I had known for twenty years. The fullest conviction that all was over gave me a strength that amazed even her. I swear she was surprised by my steadfastness in that final hour."

Varvara Petrovna suddenly put her pencil down on the table and quickly turned to Stepan Trofimovich.

"Stepan Trofimovich, we must talk business. I'm sure you have prepared all your magnificent words and various little phrases, but it would be better if we got straight to business, right?"

He flinched. She was in too much of a hurry to set her tone—what would come next?

"Wait, keep still, let me speak, then you can, though I really don't know what you'd be able to say in reply," she went on in a quick patter. "The twelve hundred of your pension I regard as my sacred duty as long as you live; or, why a sacred duty, simply an agreement, that will be much more real, right? If you like, we can put it in writing. In case of my death, special arrangements have been made. But, beyond that, you now get lodgings, servants, and your full keep from me. Translated into money, that makes fifteen hundred roubles, right? I will add another three hundred roubles for emergencies, that makes it a full three thousand. Will that suffice you for a year? Doesn't seem too little? In extreme emergencies I'll add to it, however. So, take the money, send me back my servants, and live on your own, wherever you like, in Petersburg, in Moscow, abroad, or here, only not with me. Understand?"

"Not long ago a different demand was conveyed to me by those same lips just as urgently and as quickly," Stepan Trofimovich said slowly and with sad distinctness. "I resigned myself and... danced the little Cossack^[121] to please you. Oui, la comparaison peut être permise. C'était un petit cosaque du Don, qui sautait sur sa propre tombe.^[xcii]Now..."

"Stop, Stepan Trofimovich. You are terribly verbose. You did not dance, but you came out to me in a new tie and shirt, wearing gloves, pomaded and perfumed. I assure you that you yourself would have liked very much to marry; it was written on your face, and, believe me, the expression was a most inelegant one. If I did not remark upon it then and there, it was solely out of delicacy. But you wished it, you wished to marry, despite the abominations you wrote privately about me and about your bride. Now it's not that at all. And what do you mean by a cosaque du Don on some grave of yours? I don't understand the comparison. On the contrary, don't die but live, live as much as you can, I shall be very glad."

"In the almshouse?"

"In the almshouse? One doesn't go to the almshouse with an income of three thousand. Ah, I remember," she grinned. "Indeed, Pyotr Stepanovich once got to joking about the almshouse. Bah, but that was indeed a special almshouse, which is worth considering. It's for the most respectable persons, there are colonels there, one general even wants to go there. If you got in there with all your money, you'd find peace, satisfaction, servants. You could occupy yourself with your studies and always get up a game of preference ..."

"Passons.”

"Passons?" Varvara Petrovna winced. "But, in that case, that's all; you've been informed; from now on we live entirely separately."

"And that's all? All that's left of twenty years? Our final farewell?"

"You're terribly fond of exclaiming, Stepan Trofimovich. It's not at all the fashion nowadays. They talk crudely but plainly. You and these twenty years of ours! Twenty years of reciprocal self-love, and nothing more. Your every letter to me was written not for me but for posterity. You're a stylist, not a friend, and friendship is merely a glorified word, essentially a mutual outpouring of slops..."

"God, all in other people's words! Learned by rote! So they've already put their uniform on you, too! You, too, are in joy, you, too, are in the sun; chère, chère, for what mess of pottage^[122] have you sold them your freedom!"

"I am not a parrot to repeat other people's words," Varvara Petrovna boiled up. "Rest assured that I've stored up enough words of my own. What did you do for me in these twenty years? You denied me even the books which I ordered for you and which, if it weren't for the binder, would have been left uncut. What did you give me to read when I asked you, in the first years, to be my guide? Capefigue, nothing but Capefigue.^[123] You were even jealous of my development, and took measures. And meanwhile everyone laughs at you. I confess I've always regarded you as merely a critic, you are a literary critic, and that is all. When I announced, on the way to Petersburg, thatI intended to publish a magazine and dedicate my whole life to it, you at once gave me an ironic look and suddenly became terribly haughty."

"It was not that, not that ... we were afraid of persecutions then..."

"It was just that, and you could by no means have been afraid of persecutions in Petersburg. Remember how afterwards, in February, when the news swept over,^[124] you suddenly came running to me all in a fright and started demanding that I at once give you a certificate, in the form of a letter, that the proposed magazine had no relation to you at all, that the young people had come to see me and not you, that you were only a tutor who lived in the house because you were still owed some salary, right? Do you remember that? You have distinguished yourself superbly throughout your life, Stepan Trofimovich."

"That was only a moment of faintheartedness, an intimate moment," he exclaimed ruefully. "But can it be, can it really be that we will break up because of such petty impressions? Can it be that nothing else has been preserved between us from all those long years?"

"You are terribly calculating; you keep wanting to make it so that I am still indebted to you. When you returned from abroad, you looked down your nose at me and wouldn't let me utter a word, and when I myself came and spoke with you later about my impressions of the Madonna, you wouldn't hear me out and began smiling haughtily into your tie, as if I really could not have the same feelings as you."

"It was not that, probably not that... J'ai oublié."^[xciii]