Page 307 - the-idiot

those days on his knees? Stop, I’ll read it to you!’ Then she
read me a lot of verses, where it said that the Emperor spent
all the time vowing vengeance against the Pope. ‘You don’t
mean to say you don’t approve of the poem, Parfen Semeo-
novitch,’ she says. ‘All you have read out is perfectly true,’
say I. ‘Aha!’ says she, ‘you admit it’s true, do you? And you
are making vows to yourself that if I marry you, you will
remind me of all this, and take it out of me.’ ‘I don’t know,’
I say, ‘perhaps I was thinking like that, and perhaps I was
not. I’m not thinking of anything just now.’ ‘What are your
thoughts, then?’ ‘I’m thinking that when you rise from your
chair and go past me, I watch you, and follow you with my
eyes; if your dress does but rustle, my heart sinks; if you
leave the room, I remember every little word and action, and
what your voice sounded like, and what you said. I thought
of nothing all last night, but sat here listening to your sleep-
ing breath, and heard you move a little, twice.’ ‘And as for
your attack upon me,’ she says, ‘I suppose you never once
thought of THAT?’ ‘Perhaps I did think of it, and perhaps
not,’ I say. And what if I don’t either forgive you or marry,
you’ ‘I tell you I shall go and drown myself.’ ‘H’m!’ she said,
and then relapsed into silence. Then she got angry, and went
out. ‘I suppose you’d murder me before you drowned your-
self, though!’ she cried as she left the room.
‘An hour later, she came to me again, looking melancholy.
‘I will marry you, Parfen Semeonovitch,’ she says, not be-
cause I’m frightened of you, but because it’s all the same to
me how I ruin myself. And how can I do it better? Sit down;
they’ll bring you some dinner directly. And if I do marry

0 The Idiot