A bright spring day was fading into evening.

High overhead in the clear heavens small rosy clouds seemed hardly to move across the sky but to be sinking into its depths of blue.
In a handsome house in one of the outlying streets of the government town of O---- (it was in the year 1842) two women were sitting at an open window; one was about fifty, the other an old lady of seventy.
The name of the former was Marya Dmitrievna Kalitin.

Her husband, a shrewd determined man of obstinate bilious temperament, had been dead for ten years.

He had been a provincial public prosecutor, noted in his own day as a successful man of business.

He had received a fair education and had been to the university; but having been born in narrow circumstances he realized early in life the necessity of pushing his own way in the world and making money.