ere to be legally married, I should be positively glad of
it. I should say to my wife: 'My dear, hitherto I have loved you, now
I respect you, for you've shown you can protest!' You laugh! That's
because you are of incapable of getting away from prejudices. Confound
it all! I understand now where the unpleasantness is of being deceived
in a legal marriage, but it's simply a despicable consequence of a
despicable position in which both are humiliated. When the deception is
open, as in a free marriage, then it does not exist, it's unthinkable.
Your wife will only prove how she respects you by considering you
incapable of opposing her happiness and avenging yourself on her for
her new husband. Damn it all! I sometimes dream if I were to be married,
pfoo! I mean if I were to marry, legally or not, it's just the same,
I should present my wife with a lover if she had not found one for
herself. 'My dear,' I should say, 'I love you, but even more than that I
desire you to respect me. See!' Am I not right?"

Pyotr Petrovitch sniggered as he listened, but without much merriment.
He hardly heard it indeed. He was preoccupied with something else and
even Lebeziatnikov at last noticed it. Pyotr Petrovitch seemed excited
and rubbed his hands. Lebeziatnikov remembered all this and reflected
upon it afterwards.

CHAPTER II

It would be difficult to explain exactly what could have originated the
idea of that senseless dinner in Katerina Ivanovna's disordered brain.
Nearly ten of the twenty roubles, given by Raskolnikov for Marmeladov's
funeral, were wasted upon it. Possibly Katerina Ivanovna felt obliged to
honour the memory of the deceased "suitably," that all the lodgers,
and still more Amalia Ivanovna, might know "that he was in no way their
inferior, and perhaps very much their superior," and that no one had the
right "to turn up his nose at him." Perhaps the chief element was that
peculiar "poor man's pride," which compels many poor people to spend
their last savings on some traditional social ceremony, simply in order
to do "like other people," and not to "be looked down upon." It is very
probable, too, that Katerina Ivanovna longed on this occasion, at
the moment when she seemed to be abandoned by everyone, to show those
"wretched contemptible lodgers" that she knew "how to do things, how
to entertain" and that she had been brought up "in a genteel, she might
almost say aristocratic colonel's family" and had not been meant