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. 44Well, 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! . . ."
"Maybe Ferdyshchenko won't take you, Nastasya Filippovna, I'm a candid man," Ferdyshchenko interrupted, "but the prince will! You're sitting here lamenting, but look at the prince! I've been watching him for a long time . . ."
Nastasya Filippovna turned to the prince with curiosity.
"Is it true?" she asked.
"It's true," whispered the prince.
"You'll take me just as I am, with nothing?"
"I will, Nastasya Filippovna ..."
"Here's a new anecdote!" muttered the general. "Might have expected it."
The prince, with a sorrowful, stern, and penetrating gaze, looked into the face of Nastasya Filippovna, who went on studying him.
"Here's another one!" she said suddenly, turning to Darya Alexeevna again. "And he really does it out of the kindness of his heart, I know him. I've found a benefactor! Though maybe what they say about him is true, that he's . . . like that.How are you going to live, if you're so in love that you'll take Rogozhin's kind of woman—you, a prince? . . ."
"I'll take you as an honest woman, Nastasya Filippovna, not as Rogozhin's kind," said the prince.
"Me, an honest woman?"
"You."
"Well, that's . . . out of some novel! That, my darling prince, is old gibberish, the world's grown smarter now, and that's all nonsense! And how can you go getting married, when you still need a nursemaid to look after you!"
The prince stood up and said in a trembling voice, but with a look of deep conviction:
"I don't know anything, Nastasya Filippovna, I haven't seen anything, you're right, but I ... I will consider that you are doing me an honor, and not I you. I am nothing, but you have suffered and have emerged pure from such a hell, and that is a lot. Why do you feel ashamed and want to go with Rogozhin? It's your fever . . . You've given Mr. Totsky back his seventy thousand and say you will abandon everything you have here, which no one else here would do. I . . . love you . . . Nastasya Filippovna. I will die for you, Nastasya Filippovna. I won't let anyone say a bad word about you, Nastasya Filippovna... If we're poor, I'll work, Nastasya Filippovna . . ."