Pagina 28 de 1294

"Honoured sir," he began almost with solemnity, "poverty is not a

vice, that's a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkenness is

not a virtue, and that that's even truer. But beggary, honoured

sir, beggary is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your

innate nobility of soul, but in beggary--never--no one. For

beggary a man is not chased out of human society with a stick, he

is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as humiliating as

possible; and quite right, too, forasmuch as in beggary I am

ready to be the first to humiliate myself. Hence the pot-house!

Honoured sir, a month ago Mr. Lebeziatnikov gave my wife a

beating, and my wife is a very different matter from me! Do you

understand? Allow me to ask you another question out of simple

curiosity: have you ever spent a night on a hay barge, on the

Neva?"

"No, I have not happened to," answered Raskolnikov. "What do you

mean?"