Page 876 - the-idiot

to look at them, all this time.
Thanks to the manner in which he regarded Nastasia’s
mental and moral condition, the prince was to some extent
freed from other perplexities. She was now quite different
from the woman he had known three months before. He
was not astonished, for instance, to see her now so impa-
tient to marry him—she who formerly had wept with rage
and hurled curses and reproaches at him if he mentioned
marriage! ‘It shows that she no longer fears, as she did then,
that she would make me unhappy by marrying me,’ he
thought. And he felt sure that so sudden a change could not
be a natural one. This rapid growth of self-confidence could
not be due only to her hatred for Aglaya. To suppose that
would be to suspect the depth of her feelings. Nor could it
arise from dread of the fate that awaited her if she married
Rogojin. These causes, indeed, as well as others, might have
played a part in it, but the true reason, Muishkin decided,
was the one he had long suspected—that the poor sick soul
had come to the end of its forces. Yet this was an explana-
tion that did not procure him any peace of mind. At times
he seemed to be making violent efforts to think of nothing,
and one would have said that he looked on his marriage as
an unimportant formality, and on his future happiness as
a thing not worth considering. As to conversations such as
the one held with Evgenie Pavlovitch, he avoided them as
far as possible, feeling that there were certain objections to
which he could make no answer.
The prince had observed that Nastasia knew well enough
what Aglaya was to him. He never spoke of it, but he had