Youth by Leo Tolstoy Chapter 26 Page 3

told them a manifest string of lies — an expression which says, “Yes, we know he is lying, and why he is doing it, the poor young fellow!”

What I had said about Prince Ivan Ivanovitch having a country villa, I had related simply because I could find no other pretext for mentioning both my relationship to the Prince and the fact that I had been to luncheon with him that day; yet why I had said all I had about the balustrading costing 380,000 roubles, and about my having several times visited the Prince at that villa (I had never once been there — more especially since the Prince possessed no residences save in Moscow and Naples, as the Nechludoffs very well knew), I could not possibly tell you.

Neither in childhood nor in adolescence nor in riper years did