“Oh, do leave off playing the fool! Some idiot comes in, and you put us to shame!” cried the girl by the window, suddenly turning to her father with a disdainful and contemptuous air.
“Wait a little, Varvara!” cried her father, speaking peremptorily but looking at her quite approvingly. “That’s her character,” he said, addressing Alyosha again.
“And in all nature there was naught
That could find favor in his eyes—
or rather in the feminine: that could find favor in her eyes. But now let me present you to my wife, Arina Petrovna. She is crippled, she is forty‐ three; she can move, but very little. She is of humble origin. Arina Petrovna, compose your countenance. This is Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov. Get up, Alexey Fyodorovitch.” He took him by the hand and with unexpected force pulled him up. “You must stand up to be introduced to a lady. It’s not the Karamazov, mamma, who ... h’m ... etcetera, but his brother, radiant with modest virtues. Come, Arina Petrovna, come, mamma, first your hand to be kissed.”
And he kissed his wife’s hand respectfully and even tenderly. The girl at the window turned her back indignantly on the scene; an expression of extraordinary cordiality came over the haughtily inquiring face of the woman.
“Good morning! Sit down, Mr. Tchernomazov,” she said.
“Karamazov, mamma, Karamazov. We are of humble origin,” he whispered again.
“Well, Karamazov, or whatever it is, but I always think of Tchernomazov.... Sit down. Why has he pulled you up? He calls me crippled, but I am not, only my legs are swollen like barrels, and I am shriveled up myself. Once I used to be so fat, but now it’s as though I had swallowed a needle.”
“We are of humble origin,” the captain muttered again.
“Oh, father, father!” the hunchback girl, who had till then been silent on her chair, said suddenly, and she hid her eyes in her handkerchief.