“Yes,” she assented in a faint voice. “Yes,” she repeated, preoccupied and distressed.

“But I might easily not have been there. And it was quite an accident Lebeziatnikov’s turning up.”

Sonia was silent.

“And if you’d gone to prison, what then? Do you remember what I said yesterday?”

Again she did not answer. He waited.

“I thought you would cry out again ‘don’t speak of it, leave off.’” Raskolnikov gave a laugh, but rather a forced one. “What, silence again?” he asked a minute later. “We must talk about something, you know. It would be interesting for me to know how you would decide a certain ‘problem’ as Lebeziatnikov would say.” (He was beginning to lose the thread.) “No, really, I am serious. Imagine, Sonia, that you had known all Luzhin’s intentions beforehand. Known, that is, for a fact, that they would be the ruin of Katerina Ivanovna and the children and yourself thrown in—since you don’t count yourself for anything—Polenka too … for she’ll go the same way. Well, if suddenly it all depended on your decision whether he or they should go on living, that is whether Luzhin should go on living and doing wicked things, or Katerina Ivanovna should die? How would you decide which of them was to die? I ask you?”

Sonia looked uneasily at him. There was something peculiar in this hesitating question, which seemed approaching something in a roundabout way.

“I felt that you were going to ask some question like that,” she said, looking inquisitively at him.

“I dare say you did. But how is it to be answered?”

“Why do you ask about what could not happen?” said Sonia reluctantly.

“Then it would be better for Luzhin to go on living and doing wicked things? You haven’t dared to decide even that!”

“But I can’t know the Divine Providence. … And why do you ask what can’t be answered? What’s the use of such foolish questions? How could it happen that it should depend on my decision—who has made me a judge to decide who is to live and who is not to live?”

“Oh, if the Divine Providence is to be mixed up in it, there is no doing anything,” Raskolnikov grumbled morosely.

“You’d better say straight out what you want!” Sonia cried in distress. “You are leading up to something again. … Can you have come simply to torture me?”

She could not control herself and began crying bitterly. He looked at her in gloomy misery. Five minutes passed.

“Of course you’re right, Sonia,” he said softly at last. He was suddenly changed. His tone of assumed arrogance and helpless defiance was gone. Even his voice was suddenly weak. “I told you yesterday that I was not coming to ask forgiveness and almost the first thing I’ve said is to ask forgiveness. … I said that about Luzhin and Providence for my own sake. I was asking forgiveness, Sonia. …”

He tried to smile, but there was something helpless and incomplete in his pale smile. He bowed his head and hid his face in his hands.

And suddenly a strange, surprising sensation of a sort of bitter hatred for Sonia passed through his heart. As it were wondering and frightened of this sensation, he raised his head and looked intently at her; but he met her uneasy and painfully anxious eyes fixed on him; there was love in them; his hatred


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