"But aren't you suffering, too?" cried Sonia.
Again a wave of the same feeling surged into his heart, and again for an instant softened it.
"Sonia, I have a bad heart, take note of that. It may explain a great deal. I have come because I am bad. There are men who wouldn't have come. But I am a coward and . . . a mean wretch. But . . . never mind! That's not the point. I must speak now, but I don't know how to begin."
He paused and sank into thought.
"Ach, we are so different," he cried again, "we are not alike. And why, why did I come? I shall never forgive myself that."
"No, no, it was a good thing you came," cried Sonia. "It's better I should know, far better!"
He looked at her with anguish.
"What if it were really that?" he said, as though reaching a conclusion. "Yes, that's what it was! I wanted to become a Napoleon, that is why I killed her. . . . Do you understand now?"
"N-no," Sonia whispered naïvely and timidly. "Only speak, speak, I shall understand, I shall understand in myself!" she kept begging him.
"You'll understand? Very well, we shall see!" He paused and was for some time lost in meditation.
"It was like this: I asked myself one day this question–what if Napoleon, for instance, had happened to be in my place, and if he had not had Toulon nor Egypt nor the passage of Mont Blanc to begin his career with, but instead of all those picturesque and monumental things, there had simply been some ridiculous old hag, a pawnbroker, who had to be murdered too to get money from her trunk (for his career, you understand). Well, would he have brought himself to that if there had been no other means? Wouldn't he have felt a pang at its being so far from monumental and . . . and sinful, too? Well, I must tell you that I worried myself fearfully over that 'question' so that I was awfully ashamed when I guessed at last (all of a sudden, somehow) that it would not have given him the least pang, that it would not even have struck him that it was
