He wandered about Europe alone for a long time afterwards, living God knows how; he is said to have blacked boots in the street, and to have been a porter in some dockyard.

At last, a year before, he had returned to his native place among us and settled with an old aunt, whom he buried a month later.

His sister Dasha, who had also been brought up by Varvara Petrovna, was a favourite of hers, and treated with respect and consideration in her house.

He saw his sister rarely and was not on intimate terms with her.

In our circle he was always sullen, and never talkative; but from time to time, when his convictions were touched upon, he became morbidly irritable and very unrestrained in his language.
"One has to tie Shatov up and then argue with him," Stepan Trofimovitch would sometimes say in joke, but he liked him.
Shatov had radically changed some of his former socialistic convictions abroad and had rushed to the opposite extreme.