Seite 761 von 1294

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.