iage won't be to-day?" she added
irresolutely.

"It won't be to-day, and it won't be to-morrow. I can't say about the
day after to-morrow. Perhaps we shall all be dead, and so much the
better. Leave me alone, leave me alone, do."

"You won't ruin that other... mad girl?"

"I won't ruin either of the mad creatures. It seems to be the sane I'm
ruining. I'm so vile and loathsome, Dasha, that I might really send for
you, 'at the latter end,' as you say. And in spite of your sanity you'll
come. Why will you be your own ruin?"

"I know that at the end I shall be the only one left you, and... I'm
waiting for that."

"And what if I don't send for you after all, but run away from you?"

"That can't be. You will send for me."

"There's a great deal of contempt for me in that."

"You know that there's not only contempt."

"Then there is contempt, anyway?"

"I used the wrong word. God is my witness, it's my greatest wish that
you may never have need of me."

"One phrase is as good as another. I should also have wished not to have
ruined you."

"You can never, anyhow, be my ruin; and you know that yourself, better
than anyone," Darya Pavlovna said, rapidly and resolutely. "If I don't
come to you I shall be a sister of mercy, a nurse, shall wait upon the
sick, or go selling the gospel. I've made up my mind to that. I cannot
be anyone's wife. I can't live in a house like this, either. That's not
what I want.... You know all that."

"No, I never could tell what you want. It seems to me that you're
interested in me, as some veteran nurses get specially interested in
some particular invalid in comparison with the others, or still more,
like some pious old women who frequent funerals and find one corpse more
attractive than another. Why do you look at me so strangely?"

"Are you very ill?" she asked sympathetically, looking at him in a
peculiar way. "Good heavens! And this man wants to do without me!"

"Listen, Dasha, now I'm always seeing phantoms. One devil offered me
yesterday, on the bridge, to murder Lebyadkin and Marya Timofyevna, to
settle the marriage difficulty, and to cover up all traces. He asked me
to give him three roubles on account, but gave me to understand that
the whole operation wouldn't cost less than fifteen hundred. Wasn't he a
calculating devil! A regular shopkeeper. Ha ha!"

"But you're fully convinced that it was an hallucination?"

"Oh, no; not a bit an hallucination! It was simply Fedka the