wheedle, you wag your
tails like cringing dogs, and we fools give ourselves up to you, and
it's all up with us! Immediately you trample us underfoot... Miserable
loafers'"

She cursed us up and down, but there was no vigour, no malice, no
hatred of these "miserable loafers" in her cursing that I could hear.
The tone of her language by no means corresponded with its
subject-matter, for it was calm enough, and the gamut of her voice was
terribly poor.

Yet all this made a stronger impression on me than the most eloquent
and convincing pessimistic bocks and speeches, of which I had read a
good many and which I still read to this day. And this, you see, was
because the agony of a dying person is much more natural and violent
than the most minute and picturesque descriptions of death.

I felt really wretched--more from cold than from the words of my
neighbour. I groaned softly and ground my teeth.

Almost at the same moment I felt two little arms about me--one of them
touched my neck and the other lay upon my face--and at the same time
an anxious, gentle, friendly voice uttered the question:

"What ails you?"

I was ready to believe that some one else was asking me this and not
Natasha, who had just declared that all men were scoundrels, and
expressed a wish for their destruction. But she it was, and now she
began speaking quickly, hurriedly.

"What ails you, eh? Are you cold? Are you frozen? Ah, what a one you
are, sitting there so silent like a little owl! Why, you should have
told me long ago that you were cold. Come ... lie on the ground ...
stretch yourself out and I will lie ... there! How's that? Now put
your arms round me?... tighter! How's that? You shall be warm very
soon now... And then we'll lie back to back... The night will pass so
quickly, see if it won't. I say ... have you too been drinking?...
Turned out of your place, eh?... It doesn't matter."

And she comforted me... She encouraged me.

May I be thrice accursed! What a world of irony was in this single
fact for me! Just imagine! Here was I, seriously occupied at this very
time with the destiny of humanity, thinking of the re-organisation of
the social system, of political revolutions, reading all sorts of
devilishly-wise books whose abysmal profundity was certainly
unfathomable by their very authors--at this very time. I say, I was
trying with all my might to make of myself "a potent active social
force." It even seemed to me that I had part