sugar loaves. Then he stood without saying a word, his arms hanging down, as if awaiting his sentence. He was dressed exactly as earlier, except for the brand-new silk scarf on his neck, bright green and red, with an enormous diamond pin shaped like a beetle, and the huge diamond ring on the dirty finger of his right hand. Lebedev stopped within three steps of the table; the rest, as was said, gradually accumulated in the drawing room. Katya and Pasha, Nastasya Filippovna's maids, also came running and watched from under the raised door curtain with deep amazement and fear.

"What is this?" asked Nastasya Filippovna, looking Rogozhin over intently and curiously, and indicating the "object" with her eyes.

"The hundred thousand!" he replied almost in a whisper.

"Ah, so he's kept his word, just look! Sit down, please, here, right here on this chair; I'll tell you something later. Who is with you? The whole company from before? Well, let them come and sit down; there on the sofa is fine, and on the other sofa. The two armchairs there . . . what's the matter with them, don't they want to?"

Indeed, some were positively abashed, retreated, and sat down to wait in the other room, but others stayed and seated themselves as they were invited to do, only further away from the table, more in the corners, some still wishing to efface themselves somewhat, others taking heart somehow unnaturally quickly, and the more so the further it went. Rogozhin also sat down on the chair shown him, but did not sit for long; he soon stood up and did not sit down again. He gradually began to make out the guests and look around at them. Seeing Ganya, he smiled venomously and whispered to himself: "So there!" He looked without embarrassment and even without any special curiosity at the general and Afanasy Ivanovich, but when he noticed the prince beside Nastasya Filippovna, he could not tear his eyes from him for a long time, being extremely astonished and as if unable to explain this encounter to himself. One might have suspected that there were moments when he was actually delirious. Besides the shocks of that day, he had spent the whole previous night on the train and had not slept for almost two days.

"This, ladies and gentlemen, is a hundred thousand," said Nastasya Filippovna, addressing them all with some sort of feverishly impatient defiance, "here in this dirty packet. Earlier today he shouted like a madman that he would bring me a hundred thousand

in the evening, and I've been waiting for him. He was bargaining for me: he started at eighteen thousand, then suddenly jumped to forty, and then to this hundred here. He has kept his word! Pah, how pale he is! . . . It happened at Ganechka's today: I went to call on his mother, on my future family, and there his sister shouted right in my face: 'Why don't they throw this shameless woman out of here!' and spat in her brother Ganechka's face. A hot-tempered girl!"

"Nastasya Filippovna!" the general said reproachfully. He was beginning to take his own view of the situation.

"What is it, General? Indecent or something? Enough of this showing off! So I sat like some sort of dress-circle virtue in a box at the French Theater, and fled like a wild thing from all the men who chased after me in these five years, and had the look of proud innocence, all because my foolishness ran away with me! Look, right in front of you he has come and put a hundred thousand on the table, after these five years of innocence, and they probably have troikas standing out there waiting for me. He's priced me at a hundred thousand! Ganechka, I see you're still angry with me? Did you really want to take me into your family? Me, Rogozhin's kind of woman! What was it the prince said earlier?"

"I did not say you were Rogozhin's kind of woman, you're not Rogozhin's kind!" the prince uttered in a trembling voice.

"Nastasya Filippovna, enough, darling, enough, dear heart," Darya Alexeevna suddenly could not stand it. "If they pain you so much, why even look at them? And do you really want to go off with this one, for all his hundred thousand? True, it's a hundred thousand—there it sits! Just take the hundred thousand and throw him out, that's how you ought to deal with them! Ah, if I were in your place, I'd have them all . . . no, really!"

Darya Alexeevna even became wrathful. She was a kind woman and a highly impressionable one.

"Don't be angry, Darya Alexeevna," Nastasya Filippovna smiled at her, "I wasn't speaking angrily to him. I didn't reproach him, did I? I really can't understand how this foolishness came over me, that I should have wanted to enter an honest family. I saw his mother, I kissed her hand. And if I jeered at you today, Ganechka, it was because I purposely wanted to see for the last time myself how far you would go. Well, you surprised me, truly. I expected a lot, but not that! Could you possibly marry me, knowing that this one here had given me such pearls, almost on the eve of the

wedding, and that I had taken them? And what about Rogozhin? In your own house, in front of your mother and sister, he bargained for me, and after that you came as a fiancé all the same and almost brought your sister? Can it be true what Rogozhin said about you, that for three roubles you'd crawl on all fours to Vassilievsky Island?"

"He would," Rogozhin suddenly said quietly but with a look of great conviction.

"It would be one thing if you were starving to death, but they say you earn a good salary! And on top of it all, besides the disgrace, to bring a wife you hate into the house! (Because you do hate me, I know it!) No, I believe now that such a man could kill for money! They're all so possessed by this lust now, they're so worked up about money, it's as if they'd lost their minds. Still a child, and he's already trying to become a usurer. Or the one who wraps silk around a razor, fixes it tight, sneaks up behind his friend, and cuts his throat like a sheep, as I read recently.⁴⁴ Well, you're a shameless one! I'm shameless, but you're worse. I'll say nothing about this bouquet man ..."

"Is this you, is this you, Nastasya Filippovna?" the general clasped his hands in genuine grief. "You, so delicate, with such refined notions, and all at once! Such language! Such style!"

"I'm tipsy now, General," Nastasya Filippovna suddenly laughed. "I want to carouse now! Today is my day, my red-letter day, my leap day, I've waited a long time for it. Darya Alexeevna, do you see this bouquet man, this monsieur aux camélias, he's sitting there and laughing at us . . ."

"I'm not laughing, Nastasya Filippovna, I'm merely listening with the greatest attention," Totsky parried with dignity.

"Well, then, why did I torment him for a whole five years and not let him leave me? As if he was worth it! He's simply the way he has to be . . . He's still going to consider me guilty before him: he brought me up, he kept me like a countess, money, so much money, went on me, he found me an honest husband there, and Ganechka here, and what do you think: I didn't live with him for five years, but I took his money and thought I was right! I really got myself quite confused! Now you say take the hundred thousand and throw him out, if it's so loathsome. It's true that it's loathsome ... I could have married long ago, and not just some Ganechka, only that's also pretty loathsome. Why did I waste my five years in this spite! But, would you believe it, some four years ago I had

moments when I thought: shouldn't I really marry my Afanasy Ivanovich? I thought it then out of spite; all sorts of things came into my head then; but I could have made him do it! He asked for it himself, can you believe that? True, he was lying, but he's so susceptible, he can't control himself. And then, thank God, I thought: as if he's worth such spite! And then I suddenly felt such loathing for him that, even if he had proposed to me, I wouldn't have accepted him. And for a whole five years I've been showing off like this! No, it's better in the street where I belong! Either carouse with Rogozhin or go tomorrow and become a washerwoman! Because nothing on me is my own; if I leave, I'll abandon everything to him, I'll leave every last rag, and who will take me without anything? Ask Ganya here, will he? Even Ferdyshchenko won't take me! . . ."