She was quite fearless, laughing at his temper, his sarcasm, rebuking his selfishness and bad manners, avoiding his coarse and unhesitating love-making, and above all, trusting him in the oddest way as though, in spite of his faults, she placed all her reliance on him and knew that he would not fail her.

Nothing annoyed him more than her behaviour to Trenchard.

It would, of course, be absurd to say that he was jealous of Trenchard; he despised the man too deeply and was, himself, too sure of his lady to know jealousy; but he was irritated by the attention paid to him, irritated even by the attention he himself paid to him.
"Wherever I go there's that man," he said once to me.

"Why doesn't he go back to his own country ?" "I suppose," I would answer hotly, "he has other things to do than to consider your individual wishes, Alexei Petrovitch." Then he would laugh: "Well, well, Ivan Andreievitch, you sentimentalists all hang together." "Why can't you leave him alone ?" I remember that I continued.
"Because he doesn't leave me alone," he answered shortly.
It was, of course, Marie Ivanovna who brought them together.

She could not see, or rather she _would_ not see, that friendship between two such men was an impossibility.