Page 155 - the-idiot

when—there you stood before me!’
‘And how did you recognize me?’
‘From the portrait!’
‘What else?’
‘I seemed to imagine you exactly as you are—I seemed to
have seen you somewhere.’
‘Where—where?’
‘I seem to have seen your eyes somewhere; but it cannot
be! I have not seen you—I never was here before. I may have
dreamed of you, I don’t know.’
The prince said all this with manifest effort—in broken
sentences, and with many drawings of breath. He was ev-
idently much agitated. Nastasia Philipovna looked at him
inquisitively, but did not laugh.
‘Bravo, prince!’ cried Ferdishenko, delighted.
At this moment a loud voice from behind the group
which hedged in the prince and Nastasia Philipovna, divid-
ed the crowd, as it were, and before them stood the head
of the family, General Ivolgin. He was dressed in evening
clothes; his moustache was dyed.
This apparition was too much for Gania. Vain and ambi-
tious almost to morbidness, he had had much to put up with
in the last two months, and was seeking feverishly for some
means of enabling himself to lead a more presentable kind
of existence. At home, he now adopted an attitude of abso-
lute cynicism, but he could not keep this up before Nastasia
Philipovna, although he had sworn to make her pay after
marriage for all he suffered now. He was experiencing a last
humiliation, the bitterest of all, at this moment—the humil-

1 The Idiot