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- CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 307
Sonia, frightened. "Sit down with me! An honour! Why, Fn^
. . . dishonourable. . . . Ah, why did you say that?"
"It was not because of your dishonour and your sin I said that
of you, but becaiose of your great suffering. But you are a great
sinner, that's true," he added almost solemnly, "and your worst
sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.
Isn't that fearful? Isn't it fearful that you are living in this
filth which you loathe so, and at the same time you know your-
self (you've only to open your eyes) that you are not helping
any one by it, not saving any one from anything! Tell me," he
went on almost in a frenzy, "how this shame and degradation
can exist in you side by side with other, opposite, holy feelings?
It would be better, a thousand times better and wiser to leap into
the water and end it all!"
"But what would become of them?" Sonia asked faintly,
gazing at him with eyes of anguish, but not seeming surprised at
his suggestion.
Raskolnikov looked strangely at her. He read it all in her
face; so she must have had that thought already, perhaps many
times, and earnestly she had thought out in her despair how to
end it and so earnestly, that now she scarcely wondered at his
suggestion. She had not even noticed the cruelty of his words.
(The significance of his reproaches and his peculiar attitude to
her shame she had, of course, not noticed either, and that, too,
was clear to him.) But he saw how monstrously the thought of
her disgraceful, shameful position was torturing her and had
long tortured her. "What, what," he thought, "could hitherto
have hindered her from putting an end to it?" Only then he
realised what those poor little orphan children and that pitiful
half-crazy Katerina Ivanovna, knocking her head against the
wall in her consumption, meant for Sonia.
But, nevertheless, it was clear to him again that with her
character and the amount of education she had after all received,
she could not in any case remain so. He was still confronted by
the question how could she have remained so long in that posi-
tion without going out of her mind, since she could not bring
herself to jump into the water? Of course he knew that JJonia's
position was an exceptional case, though unhappily not unique
and not infrequent, indeed; but that very exceptionalness, her
tinge of education, her previous life might, one would have
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