to call on the invalid in the morning, to distract her thoughts when she was alone, and when they were alone together, Nástenka had only one thing to tell her, how kind Aleksandr Matvéitch was, and how good, and how she loved him.
XVI.
Four months passed. The watching over Nástenka and then his recollections about her deceived Kirsánof; it seemed to him that now he was out of danger as far as Viéra Pavlovna were concerned; he did not avoid her when she came to see Nástenka and stopped to talk with him; and afterwards when she tried to console him. As long as he mourned for Nástenka, there was nothing in his feelings towards Viéra Pavlovna except a friendly feeling of gratefulness towards her.
But,—the reader has already learned to know what I mean by but the same as he will always know beforehand what is going to follow the pages that he has already read,—but, of course, Kirsánof's feeling towards Nástenka had not been the same as Nástenka's feelings towards him; he had long ceased to feel love for her; he only felt well disposed to her, as towards a woman whom he had loved long before. His former love towards her was only the thirst of a youth to love some one, no matter whom. Of course Nástenka was not his equal, because they were not equal in mental development. When he ceased to be a youth, he could only feel pity for Nástenka, and nothing more; possibly he could be tender to her, on account of old recollections and compassion, and that was all. His grief for her, in fact, was very soon appeased; but when his grief was a thing of the past, he imagined that he was still occupied with it; and after he saw that he did not really feel any grief, but only recollections of it, he saw himself in such relations with Viéra Pavlovna that he found that he was entrapped in a great misfortune.
Viéra Pavlovna tried to distract him, and he gave himself up to it, for he considered himself safe, or rather not realizing that he was falling in love with Viéra Pavlovna again, or realizing that, by giving himself up to her care, he was drifting towards misfortune. Well, and what happened now in two or three months, after Viéra Pavlovna began to console him for his grief for Nástenka? Nothing except the
