Under the influence of the change in her position Varvara Petrovna talked more than usual.

She, as it were, clung to the heart of her friend, and this continued for several evenings.

A strange idea suddenly came over Stepan Trofimovitch: "Was not the inconsolable widow reckoning upon him, and expecting from him, when her mourning was over, the offer of his hand ?" A cynical idea, but the very loftiness of a man's nature sometimes increases a disposition to cynical ideas if only from the many-sidedness of his culture.

He began to look more deeply into it, and thought it seemed like it.

He pondered: "Her fortune is immense, of course, but..." Varvara Petrovna certainly could not be called a beauty.