“So you knew Lizaveta, the dealer?”

“Yes...Why, did you?” Sonya asked in return, with some surprise.

“Katerina Ivanovna has consumption, a bad case; she'll die soon,” Raskolnikov said after a pause, and without answering the question.

“Oh, no, no, no!” And with an unconscious gesture, Sonya seized both his hands, as if pleading that it be no.

“But it's better if she dies.”

“No, it's not better, not better, not better at all!” she repeated, fearfully and unwittingly.

“And the children? Where will they go, if you don't take them?”

“Oh, I really don't know!” Sonya cried out, almost in despair, and clutched her head. One could see that the thought had already flashed in her many, many times, and that he had only scared it up again.

“Well, and what if you get ill now, while Katerina Ivanovna is still with you, and you're taken to the hospital—what then?” he insisted mercilessly.

“Ah, don't, don't! That simply can't be!” And Sonya's face became distorted with terrible fright.

“Why can't it?” Raskolnikov went on, with a cruel grin. “You're not insured against it, are you? What will happen to them then? They'll wind up in the street, the lot of them; she'll cough and beg and beat her head against the wall, like today, and the children will cry... Then she'll collapse, then the police station, the hospital, she'll die, and the children...”

“Oh, no! God won't let it happen!” burst at last from Sonya's straining breast. She listened, looking at him in supplication, her hands clasped in mute entreaty, as if it were on him that everything depended.

Raskolnikov got up and began pacing the room. About a minute passed. Sonya stood with arms and head hanging, in terrible anguish.

“But can't you save? Put something aside for a rainy day?” he asked suddenly, stopping in front of her.

“No,” whispered Sonya.

“No, naturally! And have you tried?” he added, all but in mockery.

“I have.”

“But it didn't work! Naturally! Why even ask!”

And he began pacing again. Another minute or so passed.

“You don't get money every day?”

Sonya became more embarrassed than before, and color rushed to her face again.

“No,” she whispered, with painful effort.

“It's bound to be the same with Polechka,” he said suddenly.

“No, no! It can't be! No!” Sonya cried loudly, desperately, as if she had suddenly been stabbed with a knife. “God, God won't allow such horror! . . .”

“He allows it with others.”

“No, no! God will protect her! God! . . .” she repeated, beside herself.

“But maybe there isn't any God,” Raskolnikov replied, even almost gloatingly, and he looked at her and laughed.

Sonya's face suddenly changed terribly: spasms ran over it. She looked at him with inexpressible reproach, was about to say something, but could not utter a word and simply began sobbing all at once very bitterly, covering her face with her hands.

“You say Katerina Ivanovna is losing her mind, but you're losing your mind yourself,” he said, after a pause.

About five minutes passed. He kept pacing up and down, silently and without glancing at her. Finally he went up to her; his eyes were flashing. He took her by the shoulders with both hands and looked straight into her weeping face. His eyes were dry, inflamed, sharp, his lips were twitching...With a sudden, quick movement he bent all the way down, leaned towards the floor, and kissed her foot. Sonya recoiled from him in horror, as from a madman. And, indeed, he looked quite mad.

“What is it, what are you doing? Before me!” she murmured, turning pale, and her heart suddenly contracted very painfully.

He rose at once.

“I was not bowing to you, I was bowing to all human suffering,” he uttered somehow wildly, and walked to the window. “Listen,” he added, returning to her after a minute, “I told one offender today that he wasn't worth your little finger...and that I did my sister an honor by sitting her next to you.”

“Ah, how could you say that to them! And she was there?” Sonya cried fearfully. “To sit with me! An honor! But I'm...dishonorable...I'm a great, great sinner! Ah, how could you say that!”

“I said it of you not for your dishonor and sin, but for your great suffering. But that you are a great sinner is true,” he added, almost ecstatically, “and most of all you are a sinner because you destroyed yourself and betrayed yourself in vain. Isn't that a horror! Isn't it a horror that you live in this filth which you hate so much, and at the same time know yourself (you need only open your eyes) that you're not helping anyone by it, and not saving anyone from anything! But tell me, finally,” he spoke almost in a frenzy, “how such shame and baseness can be combined in you beside other opposite and holy feelings? It would be more just, a thousand times more just and reasonable, to jump headfirst into the water and end it at once!”

“And what would become of them?” Sonya asked weakly, glancing at him with suffering, but at the same time as if she were not at all surprised at his question. Raskolnikov looked at her strangely.

He read everything in that one glance of hers. So she really had already thought of it herself. Perhaps many times, in despair, she had seriously considered how to end it all at once, so seriously, indeed, that now she was almost not surprised at his suggestion. She had not even noticed the cruelty of his words (nor had she noticed, of course, the meaning of his reproaches, or his special view of her shame—that was obvious to him). But he fully understood the monstrous pain she suffered, and had long been suffering, at the thought of her dishonorable and shameful position. What, he wondered, what could so far have kept her from deciding to end it all at once? And only here did he understand fully what these poor little orphaned children meant to her, and this pitiful, half-crazed Katerina Ivanovna, with her consumption, and her beating her head against the wall.

But then, too, it was clear to him that Sonya, with her character, and the education which, after all, she did have, could in no way remain as she was. It still stood as a question for him: how had she been able to remain for so much too long a time in such a position and not lose her mind, if it was beyond her strength to drown herself? Of course, he understood that Sonya's position was an accidental social phenomenon, though unfortunately a far from isolated and exceptional one. But it would seem that this very accident, this smattering of education, and the whole of her preceding life, should have killed her at once, with her first step onto that loathsome path. What sustained her? Surely not depravity? All this shame obviously touched her only mechanically; no true depravity, not even a drop of it, had yet penetrated her heart—he could see that; she stood before him in reality . . .

“Three ways are open to her,” he thought, “to throw herself into the canal, to go to the madhouse, or...or, finally, to throw herself into a depravity that stupefies reason and petrifies the heart.” This last thought was the most loathsome of all to him; but he was already a skeptic; he was young, abstract, and consequently cruel; and therefore he could not but believe that the last outcome—that is, depravity—was the most likely.

“But can it be true?” he exclaimed to himself. “Can it be that this being, who has still kept her purity of spirit, in the end will be consciously pulled into this vile, stinking hole? Can it be that the pulling has already begun, and that she has been able to endure so far only because vice no longer seems so loathsome to her? No, no, it can't be!” he kept exclaiming, like Sonya earlier. “No, what has so far kept her from the canal is the thought of sin, and of them, those ones...And if she hasn't lost her mind so far...But who says she hasn't lost her mind? Is she in her right mind? Is it possible to talk as she does? Is it possible for someone in her right mind to reason as she does? Is it possible to sit like that over perdition, right over the stinking hole that's already dragging her in, and wave her hands and stop her ears when she's being told of the danger? What does she expect, a miracle? No doubt. And isn't this all a sign of madness?”