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14

The education of Véra Pavlovna was very ordinary, and there was nothing peculiar in her life until she made the acquaintance of Lopoukhoff, the medical student.

Véra Pavlovna grew up in a fine house, situated on the Rue Gorokhovaïa, between the Rue Sadovaïa and the Sémenovsky Bridge. This house is now duly labelled with a number, but in 1852, when numbers were not in use to designate the houses of any given street, it bore this inscription:—

House of Ivan Zakharovitch Storechnikioff, present Councillor of State.

So said the inscription, although Ivan Zakharovitch Storechnikoff died in 1837. After that, according to the legal title-deeds, the owner of the house was his son, Mikhaïl Ivanytch. But the tenants knew that Mikhaïl Ivanytch was only the son of the mistress, and that the mistress of the house was Anna Petrovna.

The house was what it still is, large, with two carriage-ways, four flights of steps from the street, and three interior court-yards.

Then (as is still the case today) the mistress of the house and her son lived on the first and naturally the principal floor. Anna Petrovna has remained a beautiful lady, and Mikhaïl Ivanytch is to-day, as he was in 1852, an elegant and handsome officer. Who lives now in the dirtiest of the innumerable flats of the first court, fifth door on the right? I do not know. But in 1852 it was inhabited by the steward of the house, Pavel Konstantinytch Rosalsky, a robust and fine-looking man. His wife, Maria Alexevna, a slender person, tall and possessed of a strong constitution, his young and beautiful daughter (Véra Pavlovna), and his son Fédia, nine years old, made up the family.

Besides his position of steward, Pavel Konstantinytch was employed as chief deputy in I know not which ministerial bureau. As an employee he had no perquisites; his perquisites as steward were very moderate; for Pavel Konstantinytch, as he said to himself, had a conscience, which he valued at least as highly as the benevolence of the proprietor. In short, the worthy steward had amassed in fourteen years about ten thousand roubles, of which but three thousand had come from the proprietor's pocket. The rest was derived from a little business peculiarly his own: Pavel Konstantinytch combined with his other functions that of a pawn-broker. Maria Alexevna also had her little capital: almost five thousand roubles, she told the gossips, but really much more. She had begun