‘My wife.’
‘Your wife!’
‘Yes, my wife; she is an old acquaintance of yours.’
‘May I ask what was your wife’s name?’
‘Vera Nikolaevna; she was an Eltsov.…’
‘Vera Nikolaevna!’ I could not help exclaiming.…
This it is, which is the important piece of news I spoke of at the beginning of my letter.
But perhaps you don’t see anything important even in this.… I shall have to tell you something of my past … long past, life.
When we both left the university in 183— I was three-and-twenty. You went into the service; I decided, as you know, to go to Berlin. But there was nothing to be done in Berlin before October. I wanted to spend the summer in Russia—in the country—to have a good lazy holiday for the last time; and then to set to work in earnest. How far this last project was carried out, there is no need to enlarge upon here … ‘But where am I to spend the summer?’ I asked myself. I did not want to go to my own place; my father had died not long before, I had no near relations, I was afraid of the solitude and dreariness.… And so I was delighted to receive an invitation from a distant cousin to stay at his country-place in T … province. He was a well-to-do, good-natured, simple-hearted man; he lived in style as a country magnate, and had a palatial country house. I went to stay there. My cousin had a large family; two sons and five daughters. Besides them, there was always a crowd of people in his house. Guests were for ever arriving; and yet it wasn’t jolly at all. The days were spent in noisy entertainments, there was no chance of being by oneself. Everything was done in common, every one tried to be entertaining, to invent some amusement, and at the end of the day every one was fearfully exhausted. There was something vulgar about the way we lived. I was already beginning to look forward to getting away, and was only waiting till my cousin’s birthday festivities were over, when on the very day of those festivities, at the ball, I saw Vera Nikolaevna Eltsov—and I stayed on.