been particularly absentminded,
and could not discriminate between objects and persons unless he
concentrated special attention upon them.

He remembered seeing something in the window marked at sixty copecks.
Therefore, if the shop existed and if this object were really in
the window, it would prove that he had been able to concentrate his
attention on this article at a moment when, as a general rule,
his absence of mind would have been too great to admit of any such
concentration; in fact, very shortly after he had left the railway
station in such a state of agitation.

So he walked back looking about him for the shop, and his heart beat
with intolerable impatience. Ah! here was the very shop, and there was
the article marked "60 cop." "Of course, it's sixty copecks," he thought,
and certainly worth no more." This idea amused him and he laughed.

But it was a hysterical laugh; he was feeling terribly oppressed. He
remembered clearly that just here, standing before this window, he had
suddenly turned round, just as earlier in the day he had turned and
found the dreadful eyes of Rogojin fixed upon him. Convinced, therefore,
that in this respect at all events he had been under no delusion, he
left the shop and went on.

This must be thought out; it was clear that there had been no
hallucination at the station then, either; something had actually
happened to him, on both occasions; there was no doubt of it. But again
a loathing for all mental exertion overmastered him; he would not
think it out now, he would put it off and think of something else.
He remembered that during his epileptic fits, or rather immediately
preceding them, he had always experienced a moment or two when his whole
heart, and mind, and body seemed to wake up to vigour and light; when
he became filled with joy and hope, and all his anxieties seemed to be
swept away for ever; these moments were but presentiments, as it were,
of the one final second (it was never more than a second) in which the
fit came upon him. That second, of course, was inexpressible. When his
attack was over, and the prince reflected on his symptoms, he used to
say to himself: "These moments, short as they are, when I feel such
extreme consciousness of myself, and consequently more of life than
at other times, are due only to the disease--to the sudden rupture of
normal conditions. Therefore they are not really a higher kind of life,
but a lower." This reasoning, however, seeme