Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com daughter lived with him, with her two unmarried daugh-
ters, grown-up girls, who had finished their education.
They were of agreeable appearance and lively character, and
though everyone knew they would have no dowry, they at-
tracted all the young men of fashion to their grandfather’s
house.
Mihail Makarovitch was by no means very efficient in his
work, though he performed his duties no worse than many
others. To speak plainly, he was a man of rather narrow
education. His understanding of the limits of his adminis-
trative power could not always be relied upon. It was not so
much that he failed to grasp certain reforms enacted dur-
ing the present reign, as that he made conspicuous blunders
in his interpretation of them. This was not from any special
lack of intelligence, but from carelessness, for he was always
in to great a hurry to go into the subject.
‘I have the heart of a soldier rather than of a civilian,’ he
used to say of himself. He had not even formed a definite
idea of the fundamental principles of the reforms connect-
ed with the emancipation of the serfs, and only picked it
up, so to speak, from year to year, involuntarily increasing
his knowledge by practice. And yet he was himself a land-
owner. Pyotr Ilyitch knew for certain that he would meet
some of Mihail Makarovitch’s visitors there that evening,
but he didn’t know which. As it happened, at that moment
the prosecutor, and Varvinsky, our district doctor, a young
man, who had only just come to us from Petersburg after
taking a brilliant degree at the Academy of Medicine, were
playing whist at the police captain’s. Ippolit Kirillovitch,