Page 535 - the-idiot

yourself, prince. Why, if I hadn’t heard this report about
you, I should never have come all this way into the park—at
midnight, too!’
‘I don’t understand you in the least, Parfen.’
‘Oh, SHE told me all about it long ago, and tonight I saw
for myself. I saw you at the music, you know, and whom you
were sitting with. She swore to me yesterday, and again to-
day, that you are madly in love with Aglaya Ivanovna. But
that’s all the same to me, prince, and it’s not my affair at all;
for if you have ceased to love HER, SHE has not ceased to
love YOU. You know, of course, that she wants to marry you
to that girl? She’s sworn to it! Ha, ha! She says to me, ‘Until
then I won’t marry you. When they go to church, we’ll go
too-and not before.’ What on earth does she mean by it? I
don’t know, and I never did. Either she loves you without
limits or—yet, if she loves you, why does she wish to mar-
ry you to another girl? She says, ‘I want to see him happy,’
which is to say—she loves you.’
‘I wrote, and I say to you once more, that she is not in her
right mind,’ said the prince, who had listened with anguish
to what Rogojin said.
‘Goodness knows—you may be wrong there! At all events,
she named the day this evening, as we left the gardens. ‘In
three weeks,’ says she, ‘and perhaps sooner, we shall be mar-
ried.’ She swore to it, took off her cross and kissed it. So it all
depends upon you now, prince, You see! Ha, ha!’
‘That’s all madness. What you say about me, Parfen, nev-
er can and never will be. Tomorrow, I shall come and see
you—‘

The Idiot