When it was daylight and carriages were already beginning to rumble in the street, Vassilyev was lying motionless on the sofa, staring into space.  He was no longer thinking of the women, nor of the men, nor of missionary work.  His whole attention was turned upon the spiritual agony which was torturing him.  It was a dull, vague, undefined anguish akin to misery, to an extreme form of terror and to despair.  He could point to the place where the pain was, in his breast under his heart; but he could not compare it with anything.  In the past he had had acute toothache, he had had pleurisy and neuralgia, but all that was insignificant compared with this spiritual anguish.  In the presence of that pain life seemed loathsome.  The dissertation, the excellent work he had written already, the people he loved, the salvation of fallen women—­everything that only the day before he had cared about or been indifferent to, now when he thought of them irritated him in the same way as the noise of the carriages, the scurrying footsteps of the waiters in the passage, the daylight....  If at that moment someone had performed a great deed of mercy or had committed a revolting outrage, he would have felt the same repulsion for both actions.  Of all the thoughts that strayed through his mind only two did not irritate him:  one was that at every moment he had the power to kill himself, the other that this agony would not last more than three days.  This last he knew by experience.

After lying for a while he got up and, wringing his hands, walked about the room, not as usual from corner to corner, but round the room beside the walls.  As he passed he glanced at himself in the looking-glass.  His face looked pale and sunken, his temples looked hollow, his eyes were bigger, darker, more staring, as though they belonged to someone else, and they had an expression of insufferable mental agony.

At midday the artist knocked at the door.

“Grigory, are you at home?” he asked.

Getting no answer, he stood for a minute, pondered, and answered himself in Little Russian:  “Nay.  The confounded fellow has gone to the University.”

And he went away.  Vassilyev lay down on the bed and, thrusting his head under the pillow, began crying with agony, and the more freely his tears flowed the more terrible his mental anguish became.  As it began to get dark, he thought of the agonizing night awaiting him, and was overcome by a horrible despair.  He dressed quickly, ran out of his room, and, leaving his door wide open, for no object or reason, went out into the street.  Without asking himself where he should go, he walked quickly along Sadovoy Street.