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- CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 43
of Starvation. It has to be paid for, it has to be paid for, Dounia,
this smartness. And what if it's more than you can bear after-
wards, ifyou regret it? The bitterness, the misery, the curses,
the tears hidden from all the world, for you are not a Marfa
Petrovna. And how will your mother feel then? Even now she
is uneasy, she is worried, but then, when she sees it all clearly?
And I? Yes, indeed, what have you taken me for? I won't have
your sacrifice, Dounia, I won't have it, mother! It shall not be,
so long as I am alive, it shall not, it shall not! I won't accept it!"
He suddenly paused in his reflections and stood still.
"It shall not be? But what are you going to do to prevent it?
You'll forbid it? And what right have you? What can you
promise them on your side to give you such a right? Your whole
life, your whole future, you will devote to them when you have
finished your studies and obtained a post? Yes, we have heard all
that before, and that's all words, but now? Now something must
be done, now, do you understand that? And what are you doing
now? You are living upon them. They borrow on their hun-
dred roubles pension. They borrow from the Svidrigai'lovs. How
are you going to save them from Svidrigailovs, from Afanasy
Ivanovitch Vahrushin, oh, future millionaire Zeus who would
arrange their lives for them? In another ten years? In another
ten years, mother will be blind with knitting shawls, maybe with
weeping too. She will be worn to a shadow with fasting; and
my sister? Imagine for a moment what may have become of
your sister in ten years? What may happen to her during those
ten years? Can you fancy?"
So he tortured himself, fretting himself with such questions,
and finding a kind of enjoyment in it. And yet all these ques-
tions were not new ones suddenly confronting him, they were
old familiar aches. It was long since they had first begun to
grip and rend his heart. Long, long ago his present anguish had
its first beginnings; it had waxed and gathered strength, it had
matured and concentrated, until it had taken the form of a
fearful, frenzied and fantastic question, which tortured his
heart and mind, clamouring insistently for an answer. Now his
mother's letter had burst on him like a thunderclap. It was
clear that he must not now suffer passively, worrying himself
over unsolved questions, but that he must do something, do it at
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