or the ragged attendant who would be asleep
somewhere in the midst of candle-ends and all sorts of rubbish, to pay
him for the room and leave the hotel. "It's the best minute; I couldn't
choose a better."

He walked for some time through a long narrow corridor without finding
anyone and was just going to call out, when suddenly in a dark corner
between an old cupboard and the door he caught sight of a strange object
which seemed to be alive. He bent down with the candle and saw a little
girl, not more than five years old, shivering and crying, with her
clothes as wet as a soaking house-flannel. She did not seem afraid of
Svidrigailov, but looked at him with blank amazement out of her big
black eyes. Now and then she sobbed as children do when they have been
crying a long time, but are beginning to be comforted. The child's face
was pale and tired, she was numb with cold. "How can she have come here?
She must have hidden here and not slept all night." He began questioning
her. The child suddenly becoming animated, chattered away in her baby
language, something about "mammy" and that "mammy would beat her," and
about some cup that she had "bwoken." The child chattered on without
stopping. He could only guess from what she said that she was a
neglected child, whose mother, probably a drunken cook, in the service
of the hotel, whipped and frightened her; that the child had broken
a cup of her mother's and was so frightened that she had run away the
evening before, had hidden for a long while somewhere outside in the
rain, at last had made her way in here, hidden behind the cupboard and
spent the night there, crying and trembling from the damp, the darkness
and the fear that she would be badly beaten for it. He took her in his
arms, went back to his room, sat her on the bed, and began undressing
her. The torn shoes which she had on her stockingless feet were as
wet as if they had been standing in a puddle all night. When he had
undressed her, he put her on the bed, covered her up and wrapped her in
the blanket from her head downwards. She fell asleep at once. Then he
sank into dreary musing again.

"What folly to trouble myself," he decided suddenly with an oppressive
feeling of annoyance. "What idiocy!" In vexation he took up the candle
to go and look for the ragged attendant again and make haste to go away.
"Damn the child!" he thought as he opened the door, but he turned again
to see whether the child was asleep. He rais