was relieved at those words. There is no doubt that the mere fact that he could come and see Aglaia again without hindrance, that he was allowed to talk to her, sit with her, walk with her was the utmost bliss to him; and who knows, perhaps he would have been satisfied with that for the rest of his life. (It was just this contentment that Lizaveta Prokofyevna secretly dreaded; she understood him; she dreaded many things in secret, which she could not have put into words herself.)
It’s difficult to describe how completely Myshkin regained his spirits and courage that evening. He was so light-hearted that they grew light-hearted watching him — as Aglaia’s sisters expressed it afterwards. He was talkative, and that had not happened to him again since the morning, six months aqo, when he had first made the acquaintance of the Epanchins. On his return to Petersburg he was noticeably and intentionally silent, and had quite lately said to Prince S. in the presence of all, that he must restrain himself and be silent, that he might not degrade an idea by his expressing it. He was almost the only one who talked that evening, he described many things. He answered questions clearly, minutely, and with pleasure. But there was not a glimpse of a word approaching love-making in his conversation. He expressed earnest, sometimes profound ideas. Myshkin even expounded some of his own views, his own private observations, so that it would have been funny, if it had not been so well expressed; as all who heard him that evening agreed later on. Though General Epanchin liked serious subjects of conversation, yet both he and Lizaveta Prokofyevna secretly thought it was too intellectual, so that they felt actually sad at the end of the evening. But Myshkin went so far at last to tell some very amusing stories, which he was the first to laugh at, so that the others laughed more at his joyful laugh than at the story itself. As for Aglaia, she hardly spoke all the evening; but she listened all the while to Lyov Nikolayevitch, and gazed at him even more than she listened.
“She looks at him and can’t take her eyes off him; she hangs on every word he utters, she catches everything,” Lizaveta Prokofyevna said afterwards to her husband. “But tell her that she loves him and you’ll have the walls about your ears.”
“There’s no help for it, it’s fate!” said the general, shrugging his shoulders.
And long afterwards he kept repeating the phrase which pleased him. We will add that, as a business man, he too disliked a great deal in the present position, above all its indefiniteness. But he, too, resolved for the time to keep quiet, and to take his cue … from Lizaveta Prokofyevna.
The happy frame of mind of the family did not last long. Next day Aglaia quarrelled with Myshkin again, and things went on like that for several days. For hours together she would jeer at Myshkin and make him almost a laughing-stock. It is true they would sometimes sit for an hour or two together in the arbour in the garden, but it was observed that, at such times, Myshkin almost always read aloud the newspaper or some book to Aglaia.
“Do you know,” Aglaia said one day, interrupting his reading of the newspaper, “I have noticed that you are dreadfully uneducated. “Vbu don’t know anything thoroughly, if one asks you who some one is, or in what year anything happened, or the name of a treaty. You’re much to be pitied.”
“I told you that I have not much learning,” answered Myshkin.
“What have you if you haven’t that? How can I respect you after that? Read on; or rather, don’t. Leave off reading.”
And again, that evening, there was something that mystified them all in her behaviour. Prince S. came back; Aglaia was very cordial to him, she made many inquiries about Yevgeny Pavlovitch. (Myshkin had not yet come in.) Suddenly Prince S. permitted himself an allusion to “another approaching event in the family,” to a few words which had escaped Lizaveta Prokofyevna, suggesting that they might have to put off Adelaida’s wedding again in order that the two weddings might take place together. Aglaia flared up in a way no one could have expected at “these stupid suppositions,” and among other things the phrase broke from her that she had “no intention at present of taking the place of anybody’s mistress.”
These words struck everybody, and above all her parents. In a secret confabulation with her husband, Lizaveta Prokofyevna insisted that he must go into the question of Nastasya Filippovna with Myshkin, once for all.
Ivan Fyodorovitch swore that all this was only “a whim,” and put it down to Aglaia’s “delicacy”; that if Prince S. had not referred to the marriage there would not have been this outburst, because Aglaia knew herself, knew on good authority, that it was all a slander of ill-natured people, and that Nastasya Filippovna was going to marry Rogozhin, that the prince had nothing to do with it, let alone a liaison with her; and never had had, if one’s to speak the whole truth.
“Vfet Myshkin went on being blissful and untroubled by anything. Oh, of course, he too noticed sometimes something gloomy and impatient in Aglaia’s expression; but he had more faith in something different, and the gloom vanished of itself.
Once having faith in anything, he could not waver afterwards. Perhaps he was too much at ease in his mind; so it seemed at least to Ippolit who chanced to meet him in the park.
“Well, didn’t I tell you at the time that you were in love?” he began, going up to Myshkin and stopping him.
Myshkin shook hands with him and congratulated him on his “looking so much better.” The invalid seemed hopeful himself, as consumptives are so apt to be.
He had come up to Myshkin to say something sarcastic about his happy expression, but he soon drifted off the subject and began to talk about himself. He began complaining, and his complaints were many and long-winded, and rather incoherent.
“You wouldn’t believe,” he concluded, “how irritable they all are there; how petty, how egoistic, vain, and commonplace. Would you believe it, they only took me on condition of my dying as quickly as possible, and now they’re all in a fury that I am not dying, but, on the contrary, better. It’s a farce! I bet you don’t believe me.”
Myshkin had no inclination to reply.
“I sometimes think of moving back to you again,” Ippolit added carelessly. “So you don’t think they’re capable of taking a man in on condition of his dying as quickly as possible?”
“I thought they invited you with other views.”
“Aha! You are by no means so simple as you are reputed to be! Now is not the time, or I’d tell you something about that wretched Ganya and his hopes. They’re undermining your position, prince; they’re doing it mercilessly and . . . it’s quite pitiful to see you so serene. But, alas! you can’t help it!”
“That’s a funny thing to pity me for!” laughed Myshkin; “do you think I should be happier if I were less serene?”
“Better be unhappy and know the truth, than be happy and live . . . like a fool. You don’t seem to believe that you have a rival — and in that quarter?”
“What you say about a rival is rather cynical, Ippolit; I am sorry I have not the right to answer you. As for Gavril Ardalionovitch, judge for yourself whether he can be happy in his mind after all he has lost; that is, if you know anything at all about his affairs? It seems to me better to look at it from that point of view. There’s time for him to change; he has a life before him, and life is rich . . . though . . . though. . . .” Myshkin broke off uncertainly. “As for under-mining I don’t know what you are talking about; let’s drop this conversation, Ippolit.”
“We’ll drop it for the time; besides, you must always go in for being gentlemanly, of course. “Vfes, prince, you’d have to touch it with your finger in order to disbelieve it again. Ha, ha! And do you despise me very much now, what do you think?”
“What for? Because you have suffered and are still suffering more than we?”
“No, but because lam unworthy of my suffering.”
“If anyone is able to suffer more, he must be more worthy of suffering. When Aglaia Ivanovna read your confession, she wanted to see you, but….”
“She’s putting it off . . . she can’t. I understand, I understand …” Ippolit interrupted, as though anxious to break off the conversation as quickly as possible. “By the way, they tell me that you read all that rigmarole aloud to her yourself; it was literally in delirium that I wrote it and … did it. And I don’t understand how anyone can be so — I won’t say cruel (it would be humiliating for me), but so childishly vain and revenqeful, as to reproach me with that confession and to use it against me as a weapon. Don’t be uneasy, I’m not talking about you.”
“But I am sorry that you repudiate that manuscript, Ippolit; it is sincere, and you know that even the most absurd points in it, and there are many of them” (Ippolit scowled), “are redeemed by suffering, because to confess them is suffering and . . . perhaps great manliness. The idea that animated you must have had a noble foundation,