Dounia, with more animation. “I saw clearly that it was too na�vely expressed, and that perhaps he simply has no skill in writing... that is a true criticism, brother. I did not expect, indeed...”

“It is expressed in legal style, and sounds coarser than perhaps he intended. But I must disillusion you a little. There is one expression in the letter, one slander about me, and rather a contemptible one. I gave the money last night to the widow, a woman in consumption, crushed with trouble, and not ‘on the pretext of the funeral,’ but simply to pay for the funeral, and not to the daughter — a young woman, as he writes, of notorious behaviour (whom I saw last night for the first time in my life) — but to the widow. In all this I see a too hasty desire to slander me and to raise