He was
looking back then, when he spoke to me, to something that seemed
almost fantastic in its ironical reality. Every word of that
conversation he afterwards recalled to himself again and again. As to
Marie Ivanovna I think that he never even began to understand her;
that he should believe in her was a different matter from his
understanding her. That he should worship her was a tribute both to
his inexperience and to his sentiment. But his relation to her and to
this whole adventure of his was confused and complicated by the fact
that he was not, I believe, in himself a sentimental man. What one
supposed to be sentiment was a quite honest and naked lack of
knowledge of the world. As experience came to him sentiment fell away
from him. But experience was never to come to him in regard to Marie
Ivanovna; he was to know as little of her at the end as he had known
at the beginning, and this whole conversation with her (of course, I
have only his report of it) is clouded with his romantic conception of
her.
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