ought to be proved of real benefit to humanity. You have afforded the upholders of darkness and wickedness an argument against your holy principles. Now I am not speaking at all about the fact that you are going to injure the welfare of fifty people. What does fifty people mean? You have injured the chances of humanity; you have proved to be a traitor against progress. This, Viéra Pavlovna, in the language of the Church, is called a sin against the Holy Ghost,—a sin about which is said that any other sin may be forgiven to a person, but this, never, never. Isn't it true that you are a criminal? But it is well that every thing has ended as it has, and that your sins were committed only in your imagination; but, however, you are really blushing, Viéra Pavlovna. Good! I will give you some consolation. If you were not suffering so keenly, you would not have committed such horrible crimes, even in your imagination. Consequently the real criminal in things is the one who has caused you so much trouble; but you keep repeating, 'How kind he was! how kind he was!'"
"How do you make out that he is to blame for my suffering?"
"Who else? In regard to all this he has done well; I do not deny it; but why did it happen? Why all this disturbance? Nothing of the sort should have happened!"
"No, I oughtn't to have had this feeling, but I didn't ask for it; I did my best to overcome it."
"That sounds well, 'ought not to have had it'! The real cause of your sin you have not perceived; and, for what you are not to blame at all, you reproach yourself. This feeling was bound infallibly to arise as soon as your nature and Dmitri Sergéitch's came into contact; if not one way, then another, it would have been developed anyhow; for the root of the feeling does not lie in the fact that you love another; that is a consequence: the root of the feeling is the dissatisfaction with your former relations. In what form was this dissatisfaction bound to develop? If both you and he, or either one of you, had been people of no intelligence, not refined or even bad, it would have been developed in its usual form—a quarrel between husband and wife. You would have fought like cats and dogs, if both of you had been bad; or if one of you had been bad, one would have eaten the other up, and the other would have been eaten. At all events, there would have been a domestic galleys, such as
