VIII.
After these occurrences, Katerina Vasílyevna was long melancholy; but her melancholy, though developed by this state of things, was not at all attributable to this special state of things. There are characters to whom a special fact in itself has very little interest, and serves only to engender general ideas which act upon them with much greater power. If such people possess remarkably strong minds, they become reformers nowadays just as in ancient times they became great philosophers. Kant, Fichte, Hegel, never worked out private questions; it was too tedious for them. This, of course, is true only of men; women, according to the prevailing idea, have very little understanding. Nature did not give it them, just as she did not give a clean face to blacksmiths, straight backs to tailors, a delicate sense of smell to shoemakers; all this is nature. It is for this reason that there are no women of great intellect. People of weak minds and with tendency of character become phlegmatic even to apathy. People of ordinary brains are inclined to melancholy, to a quiet life, and are generally imaginative. This does not signify that they are chimerical. In a good many cases the imagination is weak and they are very positive people. They simply love a quiet revery.
Katerina Vasílyevna had been in love with Jean Sólovtsof on account of his letters. She was dying with love founded only on her imagination. It may readily be seen that she was inclined to be very romantic, and frivolous life led by the trivial people who frequented Pólozof's house did not at all dispose her to an exalted idealism. This shows that this feature of her character arose from her own nature. She had long been burdened by the frivolity of that kind of life; she loved to read and dream. And now she was troubled not only by its frivolity, but by the wealth with which she was surrounded. It must not be thought that because she had this feeling, she had an extraordinary nature; it is common among all wealthy women of a humble and retiring character. In her it developed earlier than ordinary, simply because she had early received a powerful lesson.
"Whom shall I believe? What shall I believe?" she asked herself after the episode with Sólovtsof, and it seemed
