“Come home, dear,” she said.

“When a train passes—­then under a carriage, and there will be an end,” Katusha was thinking, without heeding the girl.

And she made up her mind to do it, when, as it always happens, when a moment of quiet follows great excitement, he, the child—­his child—­made himself known within her.  Suddenly all that a moment before had been tormenting her, so that it had seemed impossible to live, all her bitterness towards him, and the wish to revenge herself, even by dying, passed away; she grew quieter, got up, put the shawl on her head, and went home.

Wet, muddy, and quite exhausted, she returned, and from that day the change which brought her where she now was began to operate in her soul.  Beginning from that dreadful night, she ceased believing in God and in goodness.  She had herself believed in God, and believed that other people also believed in Him; but after that night she became convinced that no one believed, and that all that was said about God and His laws was deception and untruth.  He whom she loved, and who had loved her—­yes, she knew that—­had thrown her away; had abused her love.  Yet he was the best of all the people she knew.  All the rest were still worse.  All that afterwards happened to her strengthened her in this belief at every step.  His aunts, the pious old ladies, turned her out when she could no longer serve them as she used to.  And of all those she met, the women used her as a means of getting money, the men, from the old police officer down to the warders of the prison, looked at her as on an object for pleasure.  And no one in the world cared for aught but pleasure.  In this belief the old author with whom she had come together in the second year of her life of independence had strengthened her.  He had told her outright that it was this that constituted the happiness of life, and he called it poetical and aesthetic.

Everybody lived for himself only, for his pleasure, and all the talk concerning God and righteousness was deception.  And if sometimes doubts arose in her mind and she wondered why everything was so ill-arranged in the world that all hurt each other, and made each other suffer, she thought it best not to dwell on it, and if she felt melancholy she could smoke, or, better still, drink, and it would pass.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

SUNDAY IN PRISON—­PREPARING FOR MASS.

On Sunday morning at five o’clock, when a whistle sounded in the corridor of the women’s ward of the prison, Korableva, who was already awake, called Maslova.