"It's very good that you laugh. I see you're a most kind young man," said Mrs. Epanchin.

"Sometimes I'm not," replied the prince.

"And I am kind," Mrs. Epanchin put in unexpectedly, "I'm always kind, if you wish, and that is my only failing, because one should not always be kind. I'm often very angry, with these ones here, with Ivan Fyodorovich especially, but the trouble is that I'm kindest when I'm angry. Today, before you came, I was angry and pretended I didn't and couldn't understand anything. That happens to me—like a child. Aglaya taught me a lesson; I thank you, Aglaya. Anyhow, it's all nonsense. I'm still not as stupid as I seem and as my daughters would have me appear. I have a strong character and am not very shy. Anyhow, I don't say it spitefully. Come here, Aglaya, kiss me. Well . . . enough sentiment," she observed, when Aglaya kissed her with feeling on the lips and hand. "Go on, Prince. Perhaps you'll remember something more interesting than the ass."

"I still don't understand how it's possible to tell things just like that," Adelaida observed again. "I wouldn't find anything to say."

"But the prince would, because the prince is extremely intelligent and at least ten times more intelligent than you, or maybe twelve times. I hope you'll feel something after that. Prove it to them, Prince, go on. We can indeed finally get past that ass. Well, so, besides the ass, what did you see abroad?"

"That was intelligent about the ass, too," observed Alexandra. "The prince spoke very interestingly about the case of his illness, and how he came to like everything because of one external push. It has always been interesting to me, how people go out of their minds and then recover again. Especially if it happens suddenly."

"Isn't it true? Isn't it true?" Mrs. Epanchin heaved herself up. "I see you, too, can sometimes be intelligent. Well, enough

laughing! You stopped, I believe, at nature in Switzerland, Prince. Well?"

"We came to Lucerne, and I was taken across the lake. I felt how good it was, but I also felt terribly oppressed," said the prince.

"Why?" asked Alexandra.

"I don't understand why. I always feel oppressed and uneasy when I look at such nature for the first time—both good and uneasy. Anyhow, that was all while I was still sick."

"Ah, no, I've always wanted very much to see it," said Adelaida. "I don't understand why we never go abroad. For two years I've been trying to find a subject for a picture:

East and South have long since been portrayed . . ²²

Find me a subject for a picture, Prince."

"I don't understand anything about it. It seems to me you just look and paint."

"I don't know how to look."

"Why are you talking in riddles? I don't understand a thing!" Mrs. Epanchin interrupted. "What do you mean, you don't know how to look? You have eyes, so look. If you don't know how to look here, you won't learn abroad. Better tell us how you looked yourself, Prince."

"Yes, that would be better," Adelaida added. "The prince did learn to look abroad."

"I don't know. My health simply improved there; I don't know if I learned to look. Anyhow, I was very happy almost the whole time."

"Happy! You know how to be happy?" Aglaya cried out. "Then how can you say you didn't learn to look? You should teach us."

"Teach us, please," Adelaida laughed.

"I can't teach you anything," the prince was laughing, too. "I spent almost all my time abroad living in a Swiss village; occasionally I went somewhere not far away; what can I teach you? At first I was simply not bored; I started to recover quickly; then every day became dear to me, and the dearer as time went on, so that I began to notice it. I went to bed very content, and got up happier still. But why all that—it's rather hard to say."

"So you didn't want to go anywhere, you had no urge to go anywhere?" asked Alexandra.

"At first, at the very first, yes, I did have an urge, and I would fall into great restlessness. I kept thinking about how I was going to live; I wanted to test my fate, I became restless especially at

certain moments. You know, there are such moments, especially in solitude. We had a waterfall there, not a big one, it fell from high up the mountain in a very thin thread, almost perpendicular— white, noisy, foamy; it fell from a great height, but it seemed low; it was half a mile away, but it seemed only fifty steps. I liked listening to the noise of it at night; and at those moments I'd sometimes get very restless. Also at noon sometimes, when I'd wander off somewhere into the mountains, stand alone halfway up a mountain, with pines all around, old, big, resinous; up on a cliff there's an old, ruined medieval castle, our little village is far down, barely visible; the sun is bright, the sky blue, the silence terrible. Then there would come a call to go somewhere, and it always seemed to me that if I walked straight ahead, and kept on for a long, long time, and went beyond that line where sky and earth meet, the whole answer would be there, and at once I'd see a new life, a thousand times stronger and noisier than ours; I kept dreaming of a big city like Naples, where it was all palaces, noise, clatter, life ... I dreamed about all kinds of things! And then it seemed to me that in prison, too, you could find an immense life."

"That last praiseworthy thought I read in my Reader when I was twelve years old," said Aglaya.

"It's all philosophy," observed Adelaida. "You're a philosopher and have come to teach us."

"Maybe you're even right," the prince smiled, "perhaps I really am a philosopher, and, who knows, maybe I actually do have a thought of teaching ... It may be so; truly it may."

"And your philosophy is exactly the same as Evlampia Nikolavna's," Aglaya picked up again. "She's an official's wife, a widow, she calls on us, a sort of sponger. Her whole purpose in life is cheapness; only to live as cheaply as possible; the only thing she talks about is kopecks—and, mind you, she has money, she's a sly fox. Your immense life in prison is exactly the same, and maybe also your four-year happiness in the village, for which you sold your city of Naples, and not without profit, it seems, though it was only a matter of kopecks."

"Concerning life in prison there may be disagreement," said the prince. "I heard one story from a man who spent twelve years in prison; he was one of the patients being treated by my professor. He had fits, he was sometimes restless, wept, and once even tried to kill himself. His life in prison had been very sad, I assure you, but certainly worth more than a kopeck. And the only acquaintances he

had were a spider and a little tree that had grown up under his window . . . But I'd better tell you about another encounter I had last year with a certain man. Here there was one very strange circumstance—strange because, in fact, such chances very rarely occur. This man had once been led to a scaffold, along with others, and a sentence of death by firing squad was read out to him, for a political crime. After about twenty minutes a pardon was read out to him, and he was given a lesser degree of punishment; nevertheless, for the space between the two sentences, for twenty minutes, or a quarter of an hour at the least, he lived under the certain conviction that in a few minutes he would suddenly die. I wanted terribly much to listen when he sometimes recalled his impressions of it, and several times I began questioning him further. He remembered everything with extraordinary clarity and used to say he would never forget anything from those minutes. About twenty paces from the scaffold, around which people and soldiers were standing, three posts had been dug into the ground, since there were several criminals. The first three were led to the posts, tied to them, dressed in death robes (long white smocks), and had long white caps pulled down over their eyes so that they would not see the guns; then a squad of several soldiers lined up facing each post. My acquaintance was eighth in line, which meant he would go to the posts in the third round. A priest went up to each of them with a cross. Consequently, he had about five minutes left to live, not more. He said those five minutes seemed like an endless time to him, an enormous wealth. It seemed to him that in those five minutes he would live so many lives that there was no point yet in thinking about his last moment, so that he even made various arrangements: he reckoned up the time for bidding his comrades farewell and allotted two minutes to that, then allotted two more minutes to thinking about himself for the last time, and then to looking around for the last time. He remembered very well that he made precisely those three arrangements, and reckoned them up in precisely that way. He was dying at the age of twenty-seven, healthy and strong; bidding farewell to his comrades, he remembered asking one of them a rather irrelevant question and even being very interested in the answer. Then, after he had bidden his comrades farewell, the two minutes came that he had allotted to thinking about himself. He knew beforehand what he was going to think about: he kept wanting to picture to himself as quickly and vividly as possible how it could be like this: now he exists and