insolent
man that he was not worth your little finger... and that I did my sister
honour making her sit beside you."

"Ach, you said that to them! And in her presence?" cried Sonia,
frightened. "Sit down with me! An honour! Why, I'm... dishonourable....
Ah, why did you say that?"

"It was not because of your dishonour and your sin I said that of you,
but because of your great suffering. But you are a great sinner, that's
true," he added almost solemnly, "and your worst sin is that you have
destroyed and betrayed yourself _for nothing_. Isn't that fearful? Isn't
it fearful that you are living in this filth which you loathe so, and at
the same time you know yourself (you've only to open your eyes) that you
are not helping anyone by it, not saving anyone from anything? Tell me,"
he went on almost in a frenzy, "how this shame and degradation can exist
in you side by side with other, opposite, holy feelings? It would be
better, a thousand times better and wiser to leap into the water and end
it all!"

"But what would become of them?" Sonia asked faintly, gazing at him with
eyes of anguish, but not seeming surprised at his suggestion.

Raskolnikov looked strangely at her. He read it all in her face; so she
must have had that thought already, perhaps many times, and earnestly
she had thought out in her despair how to end it and so earnestly, that
now she scarcely wondered at his suggestion. She had not even noticed
the cruelty of his words. (The significance of his reproaches and his
peculiar attitude to her shame she had, of course, not noticed either,
and that, too, was clear to him.) But he saw how monstrously the thought
of her disgraceful, shameful position was torturing her and had long
tortured her. "What, what," he thought, "could hitherto have hindered
her from putting an end to it?" Only then he realised what those poor
little orphan children and that pitiful half-crazy Katerina Ivanovna,
knocking her head against the wall in her consumption, meant for Sonia.

But, nevertheless, it was clear to him again that with her character and
the amount of education she had after all received, she could not in any
case remain so. He was still confronted by the question, how could she
have remained so long in that position without going out of her mind,
since she could not bring herself to jump into the water? Of course he
knew that Sonia's position was an exceptional case, though unhappily not
unique and not infrequent, in