The princess got angry, and told her husband that he made use of ‘_des expressions insupportables_’; afterwards, however, she fell to musing over his words, and repeated through her teeth: ‘Well ... and it would be a good thing if we did get a lift.’ Irina enjoyed almost unlimited freedom in her parents’ house; they did not spoil her, they even avoided her a little, but they did not thwart her, and that was all she wanted.... Sometimes--during some too humiliating scene--when some tradesman would come and keep shouting, to be heard over the whole court, that he was sick of coming after his money, or their own servants would begin abusing their masters to their face, with ‘fine princes you are, to be sure; you may whistle for your supper, and go hungry to bed’--Irina would not stir a muscle; she would sit unmoved, an evil smile on her dark face; and her smile alone was more bitter to her parents than any reproaches, and they felt themselves guilty--guilty, though guiltless--towards this being on whom had been bestowed, as it seemed, from her very birth, the right to wealth, to luxury, and to homage. Litvinov fell in love with Irina from the moment he saw her (he was only three years older than she was), but for a long while he failed to obtain not only a response, but even a hearing. Her manner to him was even overcast with a shade of something like hostility; he did in fact wound her pride, and she concealed the wound, and could never forgive it. He was too young and too modest at that time to understand what might be concealed under this hostile, almost contemptuous severity. Often, forgetful of lectures and exercises, he would sit and sit in the Osinins’ cheerless drawing-room, stealthily watching Irina, his heart slowly and painfully throbbing and suffocating him; and she would seem angry or bored, would get up and walk about the room, look coldly at him as though he were a table or chair, shrug her shoulders, and fold her arms. Or for a whole evening, even when talking with Litvinov, she would purposely avoid looking at him, as though denying him even that grace. Or she would at last take up a book and stare at it, not reading, but frowning and biting her lips. Or else she would suddenly ask her father or brother aloud: ‘What’s the German for patience?’ He tried to tear himself away from the enchanted circle in which he suffered and struggled impotently like a bird in a trap; he went away from Moscow for a week. He nearly went out of his mind with misery and dulness; he returned quite thin and ill to the Osinins’.... Strange to say, Irina too had grown perceptibly thinner during those days; her face had grown pale, her cheeks were wan.... But she met him with still greater coldness, with almost malignant indifference; as though he had intensified that secret wound he had dealt at her pride.... She tortured him in this way for two months. Then everything was transformed in one day.