nd you don't
suppose that I went into it headlong like a fool? I went into it like a
wise man, and that was just my destruction. And you mustn't suppose that
I didn't know, for instance, that if I began to question myself whether
I had the right to gain power--I certainly hadn't the right--or that if
I asked myself whether a human being is a louse it proved that it wasn't
so for me, though it might be for a man who would go straight to his
goal without asking questions.... If I worried myself all those days,
wondering whether Napoleon would have done it or not, I felt clearly
of course that I wasn't Napoleon. I had to endure all the agony of that
battle of ideas, Sonia, and I longed to throw it off: I wanted to murder
without casuistry, to murder for my own sake, for myself alone! I didn't
want to lie about it even to myself. It wasn't to help my mother I did
the murder--that's nonsense--I didn't do the murder to gain wealth and
power and to become a benefactor of mankind. Nonsense! I simply did it;
I did the murder for myself, for myself alone, and whether I became a
benefactor to others, or spent my life like a spider catching men in
my web and sucking the life out of men, I couldn't have cared at that
moment.... And it was not the money I wanted, Sonia, when I did it. It
was not so much the money I wanted, but something else.... I know it all
now.... Understand me! Perhaps I should never have committed a murder
again. I wanted to find out something else; it was something else led
me on. I wanted to find out then and quickly whether I was a louse
like everybody else or a man. Whether I can step over barriers or
not, whether I dare stoop to pick up or not, whether I am a trembling
creature or whether I have the _right_..."

"To kill? Have the right to kill?" Sonia clasped her hands.

"Ach, Sonia!" he cried irritably and seemed about to make some retort,
but was contemptuously silent. "Don't interrupt me, Sonia. I want to
prove one thing only, that the devil led me on then and he has shown me
since that I had not the right to take that path, because I am just such
a louse as all the rest. He was mocking me and here I've come to you
now! Welcome your guest! If I were not a louse, should I have come to
you? Listen: when I went then to the old woman's I only went to
_try_.... You may be sure of that!"

"And you murdered her!"

"But how did I murder her? Is that how men do murders? Do men go to
commit a murder as I went