smite me! But what for? What have I done to Thee? Why dost Thou smite me?"
After that he was silent, he ceased not only to weep, but even to breathe, and became all attention, as if he were listening not to the voice which speaks through the lips, but to the voice of the soul, to the current of thought arising up within him.
"What dost thou require?" was the first clear notion expressible by words which he heard.
"What dost thou require?" he kept repeating to himself. "What? Not to suffer. To live," he answered.
And again he gave himself up entirely to an attentive expectation, so intense that even his pain did not distract him.
"To live? How do you mean to live?" asked the voice of the soul.
"To live as I lived before, well and pleasantly."
"As you lived before, well and pleasantly?" asked the voice.
And he began to go over in his imagination the best moments of his pleasant life. But, oddly enough, all these best moments of his pleasant life seemed to him to be quite different now to what they had seemed then. It was so with all of them except the recollections of his childhood. There in his childhood there was something really pleasant, with which it was possible to live if only he could go back to it. But there was now no trace of the man who had experienced this pleasantness, it was like a reminiscence of someone else.
No sooner did he begin to consider what was
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