“Allow me to ask what are you alluding to,” began the clerk, “that is to say, whose … about whom … did you say just now … But I don’t care! That’s nonsense! Widow! I forgive you. … Pass!”

And he took another drink of vodka.

Raskolnikov sat in silence, listening with disgust. He only ate from politeness, just tasting the food that Katerina Ivanovna was continually putting on his plate, to avoid hurting her feelings. He watched Sonia intently. But Sonia became more and more anxious and distressed; she, too, foresaw that the dinner would not end peaceably, and saw with terror Katerina Ivanovna’s growing irritation. She knew that she, Sonia, was the chief reason for the ‘genteel’ ladies’ contemptuous treatment of Katerina Ivanovna’s invitation. She had heard from Amalia Ivanovna that the mother was positively offended at the invitation and had asked the question: “How could she let her daughter sit down beside that young person?” Sonia had a feeling that Katerina Ivanovna had already heard this and an insult to Sonia meant more to Katerina Ivanovna than an insult to herself, her children, or her father, Sonia knew that Katerina Ivanovna would not be satisfied now, “till she had shown those draggletails that they were both …” To make matters worse someone passed Sonia, from the other end of the table, a plate with two hearts pierced with an arrow, cut out of black bread. Katerina Ivanovna flushed crimson and at once said aloud across the table that the man who sent it was “a drunken ass!”

Amalia Ivanovna was foreseeing something amiss, and at the same time deeply wounded by Katerina Ivanovna’s haughtiness, and to restore the good-humour of the company and raise herself in their esteem she began, apropos of nothing, telling a story about an acquaintance of hers “Karl from the chemist’s,” who was driving one night in a cab, and that “the cabman wanted him to kill, and Karl very much begged him not to kill, and wept and clasped hands, and frightened and from fear pierced his heart.” Though Katerina Ivanovna smiled, she observed at once that Amalia Ivanovna ought not to tell anecdotes in Russian; the latter was still more offended, and she retorted that her “Vater aus Berlin was a very important man, and always went with his hands in pockets.” Katerina Ivanovna could not restrain herself and laughed so much that Amalia Ivanovna lost patience and could scarcely control herself.

“Listen to the owl!” Katerina Ivanovna whispered at once, her good-humour almost restored, “she meant to say he kept his hands in his pockets, but she said he put his hands in people’s pockets. (Cough- cough.) And have you noticed, Rodion Romanovitch, that all these Petersburg foreigners, the Germans especially, are all stupider than we! Can you fancy anyone of us telling how ‘Karl from the chemist’s’ ‘pierced his heart from fear’ and that the idiot, instead of punishing the cabman, ‘clasped his hands and wept, and much begged.’ Ah, the fool! And you know she fancies it’s very touching and does not suspect how stupid she is! To my thinking that drunken commissariat clerk is a great deal cleverer, anyway one can see that he has addled his brains with drink, but you know, these foreigners are always so well behaved and serious. … Look how she sits glaring! She is angry, ha-ha! (Cough-cough-cough.)”

Regaining her good-humour, Katerina Ivanovna began at once telling Raskolnikov that when she had obtained her pension, she intended to open a school for the daughters of gentlemen in her native town T——. This was the first time she had spoken to him of the project, and she launched out into the most alluring details. It suddenly appeared that Katerina Ivanovna had in her hands the very certificate of honour of which Marmeladov had spoken to Raskolnikov in the tavern, when he told him that Katerina Ivanovna, his wife, had danced the shawl dance before the governor and other great personages on leaving school. This certificate of honour was obviously intended now to prove Katerina Ivanovna’s right to open a boarding-school; but she had armed herself with it chiefly with the object of overwhelming “those two stuck-up draggletails” if they came to the dinner, and proving incontestably that Katerina Ivanovna was of the most noble, “she might even say aristocratic family, a colonel’s daughter and was far superior to certain adventuresses who have been so much to the fore of late.” The certificate of honour immediately passed into the hands of the drunken guests, and Katerina Ivanovna did not try to retain it, for it actually contained the statement en toutes lettres, that her father was of the rank of a major, and also a companion of an order, so that she really was almost the daughter of a colonel.