Resurrection

"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.