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it ever happen that people do such things? Do young girls who are in love ever make such visits? Not to speak of the fact that no well-trained young lady would allow herself to do such a thing; but if she did, the conversation would be quite different. If the action performed by Katerina Vasílyevna was contrary to morality, then still more contrary to the generally accepted ideas as to the relations between men and young women, would be the character, so to speak, of this immoral action. Isn't it clear that Katerina Vasílyevna and Beaumont were not human beings, but fish? and if they were human beings, that they had the blood of fishes in their veins? The way that she usually behaved towards him in her own house, also absolutely corresponded with this theory.

"I am too tired to talk, Mr. Beaumont," she used to say when he stayed late. "You stay with papa, but I am going to bed"; and she used to leave him.

Sometimes he used to reply, "Stay quarter of an hour more, Katerina Vasílyevna."

"All right," she would say in such cases; but more often he replied, "Then good by, Katerina Vasílyevna."

What kind of people are these, I should like to know; and I should like to know if they are not simply excellent people, whose meetings are disturbed by nobody, who are free to see each other when and as much as they please, whose marriage no one will hinder as soon as they make up their minds, and who, therefore, have no reason to be possessed of devils. But still I am vexed at their cool treatment of each other, and I am not as much ashamed for them as for myself. Is it really my fate as a novelist, to compromise in the eyes of all well-bred readers, all my heroes and heroines? Some of them eat and drink; others are not possessed of devils without cause; what uninteresting people!

, so far as the old man Pólozof could judge, the affair was coming to a marriage. When the probable bride and probable bridegroom were getting to be so intimate,