Chapter 93 Part Two - Thirty One

The group of prisoners, including Maslova, was scheduled to leave on July 5th.Nekhludoff was going to go with her that day.The day before departure Nekhludoff's sister and brother-in-law came to town together to see his brother again. Nekhludoff's sister Natalia was ten years older than her brother.His growth was somewhat influenced by her.When he was a child, his sister liked him very much.Later, when she was about to get married, they hit it off very well, as if they were of the same age. Although she was a girl of twenty-five, he was still a boy of fifteen.At that time she fell in love with her brother's friend Nikolenka, and later Nikolenka died.Both siblings love Nicolenka, because they both have the universal spirit of fraternity.

Later, both of them degenerated: he served in the army and got into bad habits; she was married, but she only loved her husband physically, and her husband not only disliked everything that she and her younger brother thought were the most sacred and precious before. She loves them, and even doesn't understand their feelings, and describes her ambition of pursuing moral perfection and serving people as the goal of her life as pure vanity, wanting to show off in front of others. Natalya's husband, Lagozhinsky, had no reputation and no property, but he was a seasoned bureaucrat with dexterity.He dealt with the liberals and conservatives, adapting to the situation, being both moral and peaceful, and visited Germany twice to study the "German Socialist Movement"; faction.However, his meteoric rise and rise in the legal world was mainly due to a special ability to win the favor of women.He was not very young when he met the Nekhludoffs abroad.He made Natalia, a girl not too young, fall in love with him, and married her almost against her mother's wishes.Her mother didn't think the marriage was a match.Nekhludoff hated his brother-in-law, though he did his best not to think about it.Nekhludoff was disgusted with his brother-in-law because he was vulgar, short-sighted and headstrong.But the main reason for his resentment was that his sister should fall so passionately, selfishly, carnally in love with this spiritually poor man, and forsake all her own virtues in order to please him.It pained Nekhludoff every time he thought that Natalya was the wife of this hairy, bald, headstrong man.He couldn't contain his disgust even for the man's children.Every time he heard that Natalia was going to have a child, he felt a pity, as if she had picked up some filth from this man who was so alien to them.

The Ragozhinskis have two children, a boy and a girl, but they did not bring them this time.They had the best set of rooms in the best hotel.Natalya immediately drove to her mother's house, but did not meet her brother there.Agrafena told her that her brother had moved into a furnished apartment.Natalya went there to find him.In a dim, foul-smelling corridor, lit during the day, a dingy waiter told her that the Duke was not at home. Natalya wanted to leave a note for her brother in his room.The waiter led her there. Natalya went into his two small rooms and looked carefully.Everywhere she saw the familiar tidiness and cleanliness, but at the same time she was surprised by the simplicity of the room's furnishings.On the desk she saw the blotter bed with the brass dog on it, and some folders, some papers and stationery, some copies of the Penal Code, an English book by Henry George, and a French Tarde's writings, and tucked inside was a curved elephant-ivory knife she knew well.

She had written a note by the table begging him to come to her once, and to-day.She shook her head at the sight in front of her and went back to the hotel. Natalya was now concerned about two things about her brother: one was that he was going to marry Katyusha, which she had heard in the town where she lived, and there was a lot of talk about it; The handing over of land to the peasants was also well known and considered by many to be a dangerous political move.On the one hand Natalya was a little pleased that he was going to marry Katyusha.She admired this decisiveness, for she had seen them both for what they were before her marriage, but she shuddered at the thought of her brother marrying such a lowly woman.The latter feeling was much stronger, and she resolved to try to influence and dissuade him, though she knew it would be extremely difficult.

As for his intention to turn over the land to the peasants, that matter did not concern her very much.But her husband was very indignant about this and asked her to dissuade her younger brother.Lagozhinsky said that such behavior is rash and self-admiring; it has no meaning and can only be considered unconventional and grandstanding. "What's the point of giving the land to the farmers and the rent goes to the farmers?" he said. "If he really wanted to, he could have sold the land through the Peasant's Bank. That's all right. In short, it's almost insane," said Lagozhinsky, already thinking of Nekhludoff. A guardian is required.He told his wife to be honest with his brother about his strange intentions.