Pagina 256 di 1294

Oh, what had he to do now with his own baseness, with all these

petty vanities, officers, German women, debts, police-offices? If

he had been sentenced to be burnt at that moment, he would not

have stirred, would hardly have heard the sentence to the end.

Something was happening to him entirely new, sudden and unknown.

It was not that he understood, but he felt clearly with all the

intensity of sensation that he could never more appeal to these

people in the police-office with sentimental effusions like his

recent outburst, or with anything whatever; and that if they had

been his own brothers and sisters and not police-officers, it

would have been utterly out of the question to appeal to them in

any circumstance of life. He had never experienced such a strange

and awful sensation. And what was most agonising--it was more a

sensation than a conception or idea, a direct sensation, the most

agonising of all the sensations he had known in his life.