would have been another,—but it had to happen—" He again grew silent. Yes, he was a musician, a violin player,—not a professional musician, but a semi-professional, a semi-society man.
"His father is a landed proprietor, a neighbour of my father's. His father had lost his fortune, and his children—there were three boys—had got up in the world; only this youngest one had been taken to his godmother in Paris. There he was sent to the Conservatory, because he had talent for music, and he graduated from it as a violin player, taking part in concerts. This man was—" Apparently he was about to say something uncomplimentary of him, but he restrained himself and rapidly said, "Well, I do not know the kind of life he led; all I know is that he made his appearance that year in Russia and that he appeared at my house—
"Almond-shaped, moist eyes; red, smiling lips; pomaded moustache; the latest fashionable hair-dress; a common, handsome face, what women call not at all bad; of a weak, though not misshapen figure, with unusually well-developed hips, as with women, and such as, they say, Hottentots have. They, too, are musical. Forward to the point of familiarity, so far as possible, but sensitive and ever ready to stop at the least repulse, with the preservation of external dignity, and with that peculiarly Parisian shade of his button shoes and brightly coloured ties and all that which strangers acquire in Paris and which, on account of its novelty, always affects women. In his manners an artificial, external cheerfulness,—that manner, you know, of saying everything by hints and snatches, as though you knew and remembered it all, and were able to supplement it yourself.
"He, with his music, was the cause of everything. At the trial the case was presented as being the result of jealousy. Not at all, that is, it was not at all the reason of it, though it had something to do with it. At the
