b.

"He is gone!" she cried.

"While he is in a lighted car, sitting on a plush seat, jesting and
drinking, I stand here in the mud, rain and wind, crying," she
thought. She sat down on the ground and began to sob aloud. The little
girl was frightened, and, embracing her wet clothing, she said:

"Auntie, let's go home."

"I will wait for the next train, throw myself under the wheels, and
that will end it all," Katiousha was meanwhile thinking, not heeding
the girl.

She made up her mind to carry out her intention. But as it always
happens in the first moment of calm after a period of agitation, the
child, _his_ child, suddenly shuddered. Immediately all that which so
tortured her that she was willing to die, all her wrath and her
desire to revenge herself even by death, passed. She became calm,
arranged her clothing, put the shawl on her head, and went away.

She returned home exhausted, wet and muddy. From that day began in her
that spiritual transformation which ended in her present condition.
From that terrible night on she ceased to believe in God and in
goodness. Before that night she herself believed in God, and believed
that other people believed in Him; but after that night she became
convinced that no one believed, and all that was said of God and His
law was false and wrong. The one whom she loved, and who loved
her--she knew it--abandoned her and made sport of her feelings. And he
was the best of all the men she knew. All the others were even worse.
This she saw confirmed in all that had happened. His aunts, pious old
ladies, drove her out when she was no longer as useful as she used to
be. All the women with whom she came in contact tried to make money by
her; the men, beginning with the commissary and down to the prison
officers, all looked upon her as a means of pleasure. The whole world
was after pleasure. Her belief in this was strengthened by the old
author whom she met during the second year of her independent life. He
had told her frankly that this--he called it poetical and esthetic--is
all of life's happiness.

Every one lived for himself only, for his own pleasure, and all the
words about God and goodness were deception. And if the questions
sometimes occurred to her, Why were the affairs of the world so ill
arranged that people harm each other, and all suffer, she thought it
best not to dwell on it. If she became lonesome, she took a drink,
smoked a cigarette, and the feeling would pass a