n the
earth; he felt dispirited, bewildered, in the face of this mass; he
remembered that he had not a gift for words, that he was cowardly
and timid, that indifferent people would not be willing to listen
and understand him, a law student in his third year, a timid and
insignificant person; that genuine missionary work included not only
teaching but deeds...

When it was daylight and carriages were already beginning to rumble in
the street, Vassilyev was lying motionless on the sofa, staring into
space. He was no longer thinking of the women, nor of the men, nor of
missionary work. His whole attention was turned upon the spiritual agony
which was torturing him. It was a dull, vague, undefined anguish akin to
misery, to an extreme form of terror and to despair. He could point
to the place where the pain was, in his breast under his heart; but
he could not compare it with anything. In the past he had had acute
toothache, he had had pleurisy and neuralgia, but all that was
insignificant compared with this spiritual anguish. In the presence of
that pain life seemed loathsome. The dissertation, the excellent work
he had written already, the people he loved, the salvation of fallen
women--everything that only the day before he had cared about or been
indifferent to, now when he thought of them irritated him in the same
way as the noise of the carriages, the scurrying footsteps of the
waiters in the passage, the daylight.... If at that moment someone
had performed a great deed of mercy or had committed a revolting
outrage, he would have felt the same repulsion for both actions. Of all
the thoughts that strayed through his mind only two did not irritate
him: one was that at every moment he had the power to kill himself, the
other that this agony would not last more than three days. This last he
knew by experience.

After lying for a while he got up and, wringing his hands, walked about
the room, not as usual from corner to corner, but round the room beside
the walls. As he passed he glanced at himself in the looking-glass. His
face looked pale and sunken, his temples looked hollow, his eyes were
bigger, darker, more staring, as though they belonged to someone else,
and they had an expression of insufferable mental agony.

At midday the artist knocked at the door.

"Grigory, are you at home?" he asked.

Getting no answer, he stood for a minute, pondered, and answered
himself in Little Russian: "Nay. The confounded fello