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RUDIN white seemed black and black white; falsehood was truth, and a whim was duty. Ah! even now I feel shame at the recollection of it! Rudin—he never flagged—not a bit of it! He soared through all sorts of misunderstandings and perplexities, like a swallow over a pond.’

‘And so you parted from the girl?’ asked Alexandra Pavlovna, naïvely bending her head on one side, and raising her eyebrows.

‘We parted—and it was a horrible parting— outrageously awkward and public, quite unnecessarily public. I wept myself, and she wept, and I don’t know what passed. It seemed as though a kind of Gordian knot had been tied. It had to be cut, but it was painful! However, everything in the world is ordered for the best. She has married an excellent man, and is well off now.’

‘But confess, you have never been able to forgive Rudin, all the same,’ Alexandra Pavlovna was beginning.

‘Not at all!’ interposed Lezhnyov, ‘why, I cried like a child when he was going abroad. Still, to tell the truth, even then there was the germ in my heart. And when I met him later 128