“Still as charming and as melancholy as ever, my sweet Julie,” she would say to the daughter. “Boris says he finds spiritual refreshment in your house. He has suffered such cruel disillusionment, and he is so sensitive,” she would say to the mother.
“Ah, my dear, how attached I have grown to Julie lately,” she would say to her son, “I can’t tell you. But, indeed, who could help loving her！ A creature not of this earth！ Ah, Boris！ Boris！” She paused for a moment. “And how I feel for her mother,” she would go on. “She showed me today the letters and accounts from Penza （they have an immense estate there）, and she, poor thing, with no one to help her. They do take such advantage of her！”
Boris heard his mother with a faintly perceptible smile. He laughed blandly at her simple-hearted wiles, but he listened to her and sometimes questioned her carefully about the Penza and Nizhnigorod estates.
Julie had long been expecting an offer from her melancholy adorer, and was fully prepared to accept it. But a sort of secret feeling of repulsion for her, for her passionate desire to be married, for her affectation and a feeling of horror at renouncing all possibility of real love made Boris still delay. The term of his leave was drawing to a close. Whole days at a time, and every day he spent at the Karagins’; and each day Boris resolved, as he thought things over, that he would make an offer on the morrow. But in Julie’s presence, as he watched her red face and her chin, almost always sprinkled with powder, her moist eyes, and the expression of her countenance, which betokened a continual readiness to pass at once from melancholy to the unnatural ecstasies of conjugal love, Boris could not utter the decisive word, although in imagination he had long regarded himself as the owner of the Penza and Nizhnigorod estates, and had disposed of the expenditure of their several revenues. Julie saw the hesitation of Boris, and the idea did sometimes occur to her that she was distasteful to him. But feminine self-flattery promptly afforded her comfort, and she assured herself that it was love that made him retiring. Her melancholy was, however, beginning to pass into irritability, and not long before the end of Boris’s leave she adopted a decisive plan of action. Just before the expiration of Boris’s leave there appeared in Moscow, and—it need hardly be said—also in the drawing-room of the Karagins’, no less a person than Anatole Kuragin, and Julie, abruptly abandoning her melancholy, became exceedingly lively and cordial to Kuragin.
“My dear,” said Anna Mihalovna to her son, “I know from a trust-worthy source that Prince Vassily is sending his son to Moscow to marry him to Julie. I am so fond of Julie that I should be most sorry for her. What do you think about it, my dear？” said Anna Mihalovna.
Boris was mortified at the idea of being unsuccessful, of having wasted all that month of tedious, melancholy courtship of Julie, and of seeing all the revenues of those Penza estates—which he had mentally assigned to the various purposes for which he needed them—pass into other hands, especially into the hands of that fool Anatole. He drove off to the Karagins’ with the firm determination to make an offer. Julie met him with a gay and careless face, casually mentioned how much she had enjoyed the ball of the evening, and asked him when he was leaving. Although Boris had come with the intention of speaking of his love, and was therefore resolved to take a tender tone, he began to speak irritably of the fickleness of woman; saying that women could so easily pass from sadness to joy, and their state of mind depended entirely on what sort of man happened to be paying them attention. Julie was offended, and said that that was quite true, indeed, that a woman wanted variety, and that always the same thing would bore any one.
“Then I would advise you…” Boris was beginning, meaning to say something cutting; but at that instant the mortifying reflection occurred to him that he might leave Moscow without having attained his object, and having wasted his efforts in vain （an experience he had never had yet）. He stopped short in the middle of a sentence, dropped his eyes, to avoid seeing her disagreeably exasperated and irresolute face, and said, “But it was not to quarrel with you that I have come here. On the contrary…” He glanced at her to make sure whether he could go on. All irritation had instantly vanished from her face, and her uneasy and imploring eyes were fastened upon him in greedy expectation.
“I can always manage so as to see very little of her,” thought Boris. “And the thing’s been begun and must be finished！” He flushed crimson, raised his eyes to her face, and said to her, “You know my feeling for you！” There was no need to say more. Julie’s countenance beamed with triumph and self-satisfaction; but she forced Boris to say everything that is usually said on such occasions, to say that he loved her, and had never loved any woman more than her. She knew that for her Penza estates and her Nizhnigorod forests she could demand that, and she got all she demanded.
The young engaged couple, with no further allusions to trees that enfolded them in gloom and melancholy, made plans for a brilliant establishment in Petersburg, paid visits, and made every preparation for a splendid wedding.
