"Shameful and stupid, horrid and shameful!" Nekhludoff kept
saying to himself, as he walked home along the familiar streets.
The depression he had felt whilst speaking to Missy would not
leave him. He felt that, looking at it externally, as it were, he
was in the right, for he had never said anything to her that
could be considered binding, never made her an offer; but he knew
that in reality he had bound himself to her, had promised to be
hers. And yet to-day he felt with his whole being that he could
not marry her.
"Shameful and horrid, horrid and shameful!" he repeated to
himself, with reference not only to his relations with Missy but
also to the rest. "Everything is horrid and shameful," he
muttered, as he stepped into the porch of his house. "I am not
going to have any supper," he said to his manservant Corney, who
followed him into the dining-room, where the cloth was laid for
supper and tea. "You may go."
"Yes, sir," said Corney, yet he did not go, but began clearing
the supper off the table. Nekhludoff looked at Corney with a
feeling of ill-will. He wished to be left alone, and it seemed to
him that everybody was bothering him in order to spite him. When
Corney had gone away with the supper things, Nekhludoff moved to
the tea urn and was about to make himself some tea, but hearing
Agraphena Petrovna's footsteps, he went hurriedly into the
drawing-room, to avoid being seen by her, and shut the door after
him. In this drawing-room his mother had died three months
before. On entering the room, in which two lamps with reflectors
were burning, one lighting up his father's and the other his
mother's portrait, he remembered what his last relations with his
mother had been. And they also seemed shameful and horrid. He
remembered how, during the latter period of her illness, he had
simply wished her to die. He had said to himself that he wished
it for her sake, that she might be released from her suffering,
but in reality he wished to be released from the sight of her
sufferings for his own sake.
Trying to recall a pleasant image of her, he went up to look at
her portrait, painted by a celebrated artist for 800 roubles. She
was depicted in a very low-necked black velvet dress. There was
something very revolting and blasphemous in this representation
of his mother as a half-nude beauty. It was all the more
disgusting because three months ago, in this very room, lay this
same woman, dried up to a mummy. And he remembered how a few days
before her death she clasped his hand with her bony, discoloured
fingers, looked into his eyes, and said: "Do not judge me, Mitia,
if I have not done what I should," and how the tears came into
her eyes, grown pale with suffering.