I should have looked after her very differently!' Sipyagin heard her out with indulgence, sympathy, and serenity; he kept his stooping posture since she did not take her arms from his shoulders, and did not remove her head; he called her an angel, kissed her on the forehead, announced that he saw now the course of action dictated to him by his position, the position of the head of the house, and withdrew with the gait of a man of humane but energetic character, who has to make up his mind to perform an unpleasant but inevitable duty.
About eight o'clock, after dinner, Nezhdanov was sitting in his room writing to his friend Silin: 'Dear Vladimir, I am writing to you at the moment of a vital change in my existence. I have been dismissed from this house. I am going away. But that would be nothing. I am going from here not alone. The girl I have written to you about accompanies me. We are bound together by the similarity of our fate in life, the identity of our views and efforts, by our mutual feeling too. We love each other; at least, I believe I am not capable of feeling the passion of love in any other form than that in which it presents itself to me now. But I should be lying to you if I said I had no secret feeling of terror, even a sort of strange sinking at heart. The future is
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