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Moscow and Petersburg was elected a member of philan-
thropic societies.
At last, however, he began brooding over the past, and
the strain of it was too much for him. Then he was attract-
ed by a fine and intelligent girl and soon after married her,
hoping that marriage would dispel his lonely depression,
and that by entering on a new life and scrupulously doing
his duty to his wife and children, he would escape from old
memories altogether. But the very opposite of what he ex-
pected happened. He began, even in the first month of his
marriage, to be continually fretted by the thought, ‘My wife
loves me- but what if she knew?’ When she first told him
that she would soon bear him a child, he was troubled. ‘I am
giving life, but I have taken life.’ Children came. ‘How dare
I love them, teach and educate them, how can I talk to them
of virtue? I have shed blood.’ They were splendid children,
he longed to caress them; ‘and I can’t look at their innocent
candid faces, I am unworthy.’
At last he began to be bitterly and ominously haunted
by the blood of his murdered victim, by the young life he
had destroyed, by the blood that cried out for vengeance.
He had begun to have awful dreams. But, being a man of
fortitude, he bore his suffering a long time, thinking: ‘I shall
expiate everything by this secret agony.’ But that hope, too,
was vain; the longer it went on, the more intense was his
suffering.
He was respected in society for his active benevolence,
though everyone was overawed by his stern and gloomy
character. But the more he was respected, the more intoler-

10 The Brothers Karamazov