If I had not had those talks with Trenchard and read his diary I
should have known nothing. Even now I can offer no solution....
Meanwhile he showed fiercely and openly enough his love for Marie
Ivanovna. He behaved to her with the vulgarest ostentation, as a rich
merchant behaves when he has snatched some priceless picture from a
defeated rival. As he laughed at us he seemed to say: "Now, I have
really a thing of value here. You are, all of you, too stupid to
realise this, but you must take my word for it. Show yourself off, my
dear, and let them all see!"
Marie Ivanovna most certainly did _not_ "show herself off." The
beginning of his trouble was that he could not do with her as he
pleased. She had fallen into his hands so easily that he thought, I
suppose, that "she had been dying of love for him" from the first
moment of seeing him. But this was I believe very far from the truth.
My impression of her acceptance of him was that she had done it "with
her eyes fixed upon something else.
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