And suddenly, before his imagination, appeared with uncommon vividness the picture of the prisoner with the black, squinting eyes.  And how she wept when the last words of the prisoners were spoken!  He hastily crushed the cigarette he was smoking, lit another, and began pacing up and down the room.  One after another the scenes he had lived through with her rose up in his mind.  He recalled their last meeting, the passion which seized him at the time, and the disappointment that followed.  He recalled the white dress with the blue ribbon; he recalled the morning mass.  “Why, I loved her with a pure love that night; I loved her even before, and how I loved her when I first came to my aunts and was writing my composition!” That freshness, youth, fullness of life swept over him and he became painfully sad.

The difference between him as he was then and as he was now was great; it was equally great, if not greater, than the difference between Katiousha in the church and that girl whom they had tried this morning.  Then he was a courageous, free man, before whom opened endless possibilities; now he felt himself caught in the tenets of a stupid, idle, aimless, miserable life, from which there was no escape; aye, from which, for the most part, he would not escape.  He remembered how he once had prided himself upon his rectitude; how he always made it a rule to tell the truth, and was in reality truthful, and how he was now steeped in falsehood—­falsehood which was recognized as truth by all those around him.

And there was no escape from this falsehood; at all events, he did not see any escape.  He had sunk in it, became accustomed to it, and indulged himself in it.

The questions that absorbed him now were:  How to break loose from Maria Vasilievna and her husband, so that he might be able to look them in the face?  How, without falsehood, to disentangle his relations with Missy?  How to get out of the inconsistency of considering the private holding of land unjust and keeping his inheritance?  How to blot out his sin against Katiousha?  “I cannot abandon the woman whom I have loved and content myself with paying money to the lawyer to save her from penal servitude, which she does not even deserve.”  To blot out the sin, as he did then, when he thought that he was atoning for his wrong by giving her money!  Impossible!

He vividly recalled the moment when he ran after her in the corridor, thrust money in her bosom, and ran away from her.  “Oh, that money!” With the same horror and disgust he recalled that moment.  “Oh, how disgusting!” he said aloud, as he did then.  “Only a scoundrel and rascal could do it!  And I am that scoundrel, that rascal!” he said aloud.  “It is possible that I—­” and he stopped in the middle of the room—­“Is it possible that I am really a scoundrel?  Who but I?” he answered himself.  “And is this the only thing?” he continued, still censuring himself.  “Are not my relations toward Maria Vasilievna base and detestable?  And my position with regard to property?  Under the plea that I inherited it from my mother I am using wealth, the ownership of which I consider unlawful.  And the whole of this idle, abominable life?  And to crown all, my conduct toward Katiousha?  Scoundrel!  Villain!  Let people judge me as they please—­I can deceive them, but I cannot deceive myself.”