all of which generally had but one aim--to hasten the
building of the lodging-asylum. In her presence Foma felt awkward, huge,
heavy; this pained him, and he blushed deeply under the endearing look
of Sophya Pavlovna's large eyes. He noticed that every time she looked
at him, her eyes would grow darker, while her upper lip would tremble
and raise itself slightly, thus displaying very small white teeth. This
always frightened him. When his father noticed how steadfastly he was
staring at Medinskaya he told him one day:

"Don't be staring so much at that face. Look out, she is like a
birch ember: from the outside it is just as modest, smooth and
dark--altogether cold to all appearances--but take it into your hand and
it will burn you."

Medinskaya did not kindle in the youth any sensual passion, for there
was nothing in her that resembled Pelageya, and altogether she was not
at all like other women. He knew that shameful rumours about her were
in the air, but he did not believe any of them. But his relations to her
were changed when he noticed her one day in a carriage beside a stout
man in a gray hat and with long hair falling over his shoulders. His
face was like a bladder--red and bloated; he had neither moustache nor
beard, and altogether he looked like a woman in disguise. Foma was told
that this was her husband. Then dark and contradicting feelings sprang
up within him: he felt like insulting the architect, and at the same
time he envied and respected him. Medinskaya now seemed to him less
beautiful and more accessible; he began to feel sorry for her, and yet
he thought malignantly:

"She must surely feel disgusted when he kisses her."

And after all this he sometimes perceived in himself some bottomless and
oppressive emptiness, which could not be filled up by anything--neither
by the impressions of the day just gone by nor by the recollection
of the past; and the Exchange, and his affairs, and his thoughts of
Medinskaya--all were swallowed up by this emptiness. It alarmed him: in
the dark depth of this emptiness he suspected some hidden existence of
a hostile power, as yet formless but already carefully and persistently
striving to become incarnate.

In the meantime Ignat, changing but little outwardly, was growing ever
more restless and querulous and was complaining more often of being ill.

"I lost my sleep. It used to be so sound that even though you had torn
off my skin, I would not have felt it. While