Page 257 - the-idiot

of business. Amid his new thoughts and ideas there came,
once or twice, the image of Nastasia Philipovna. The gen-
eral sighed.
‘I’m sorry, really sorry,’ he muttered. ‘She’s a ruined
woman. Mad! mad! However, the prince is not for Nastasia
Philipovna now,—perhaps it’s as well.’
Two more of Nastasia’s guests, who walked a short dis-
tance together, indulged in high moral sentiments of a
similar nature.
‘Do you know, Totski, this is all very like what they say
goes on among the Japanese?’ said Ptitsin. ‘The offended
party there, they say, marches off to his insulter and says
to him, ‘You insulted me, so I have come to rip myself open
before your eyes;’ and with these words he does actually rip
his stomach open before his enemy, and considers, doubt-
less, that he is having all possible and necessary satisfaction
and revenge. There are strange characters in the world, sir!’
‘H’m! and you think there was something of this sort
here, do you? Dear me—a very remarkable comparison, you
know! But you must have observed, my dear Ptitsin, that I
did all I possibly could. I could do no more than I did. And
you must admit that there are some rare qualities in this
woman. I felt I could not speak in that Bedlam, or I should
have been tempted to cry out, when she reproached me, that
she herself was my best justification. Such a woman could
make anyone forget all reason— everything! Even that
moujik, Rogojin, you saw, brought her a hundred thousand
roubles! Of course, all that happened tonight was ephem-
eral, fantastic, unseemly—yet it lacked neither colour nor

The Idiot