For a moment his love had given him a new confidence but
now how was that same love deserting him? He had foreseen a glorious
campaign, his lady and himself side by side, death and terror flying
before him. He found himself leading a country life of perfect quiet
and comfort, even as he might have led it in England, with a crowd of
people, strangely unfamiliar to him, driving him, as he had been
driven in the old days, into a host of awkwardnesses, confusions and
foolishnesses. I could not forgive Marie Ivanovna for her
disappointment in him, and yet I could understand how different he
must have appeared to her during those last days in Petrograd, when
alone with her and on fire with love, he had shown his true and
bravest self to her. She was impatient, she had hoped that the others
would see him as she had seen him. She watched them as they expressed
their surprise that he was not the practical, fearless and
unimaginative Englishman who was their typical figure. Whilst he found
them far from the Karamazovs, the Raskolnikoffs, of his imagination,
they in their turn could not create the "sportsman" and "man of
affairs" whom they had expected.
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