White Nights

Have you lived or not? Look, one says to oneself, look how cold the world is growing

and at the same time he cannot refuse his imagination the little diversion of comparing the queer fellow’s countenance during their conversation with the expression of an unhappy kitten treacherously captured, roughly handled, frightened and subjected to all sorts of indignities by children, till, utterly crestfallen, it hides away from them under a chair in the dark, and there must needs at its leisure bristle up, spit, and wash its insulted face with both paws, and long afterwards look angrily at life and nature, and even at the bits saved from the master’s dinner for it by the sympathetic housekeeper?

I don’t know how to be silent when my heart is speaking.

“I expected that he would come and see us more and more often after that, but it wasn’t so at all. He almost entirely gave up coming. He would just come in about once a month, and then only to invite us to the theatre. We went twice again. Only I wasn’t at all pleased with that; I saw that he was simply sorry for me because I was so hardly treated by grandmother, and that was all. As time went on, I grew more and more restless, I couldn’t sit still, I couldn’t read, I couldn’t work; sometimes I laughed and did something to annoy grandmother, at another

time I would cry.

In two minutes you have made me happy for ever.

. . Good-bye, thank you! . . . ”

“Surely . . . surely you don’t mean . . . that we shall never see each other again? . . . Surely this is not to be the end?”

“You see,” said the girl, laughing, “at first you only wanted two words, and now. . . . However, I won’t say anything . . . perhaps we shall meet. . . . ”

You . . . perhaps it was my fancy

My God, a whole moment of happiness! Is that too little for the whole of a man's life?

May your sky be clear, may your sweet smile be bright and untroubled, and may you be blessed for that moment of blissful happiness which you gave to another, lonely and grateful heart!

to imagine that I should bear you a grudge, Nastenka! That I should cast a dark cloud over your serene, untroubled happiness; that by my bitter reproaches I should cause distress to your heart, should poison it with secret remorse and should force it to throb with anguish at the moment of bliss; that I should crush a single one of those tender blossoms which you have twined in your dark tresses when you go with him to the altar.... Oh never, never!