“You may be merry, Arina Prohorovna.… It’s a great joy,” Shatov faltered with an expression of idiotic bliss, radiant at the phrase Marie had uttered about the child.
“Where does the great joy come in?” said Arina Prohorovna good-humouredly, bustling about, clearing up, and working like a convict.
“The mysterious coming of a new creature, a great and inexplicable mystery; and what a pity it is, Arina Prohorovna, that you don’t understand it.”
Shatov spoke in an incoherent, stupefied and ecstatic way. Something seemed to be tottering in his head and welling up from his soul apart from his own will.
“There were two and now there’s a third human being, a new spirit, finished and complete, unlike the handiwork of man; a new thought and a new love … it’s positively frightening.… And there’s nothing grander in the world.”
“Ech, what nonsense he talks! It’s simply a further development of the organism, and there’s nothing else in it, no mystery,” said Arina Prohorovna with genuine and good-humoured laughter. “If you talk like that, every fly is a mystery. But I tell you what: superfluous people ought not to be born. We must first remould everything so that they won’t be superfluous and then bring them into the world. As it is, we shall have to take him to the Foundling, the day after to-morrow.… Though that’s as it should be.”
“I will never let him go to the Foundling,” Shatov pronounced resolutely, staring at the floor.
“You adopt him as your son?”
“He is my son.”
“Of course he is a Shatov, legally he is a Shatov, and there’s no need for you to pose as a humanitarian. Men can’t get on without fine words. There, there, it’s all right, but look here, my friends,” she added, having finished clearing up at last, “it’s time for me to go. I’ll come again this morning, and again in the evening if necessary, but now, since everything has gone off so well, I must run off to my other patients, they’ve been expecting me long ago. I believe you got an old woman somewhere, Shatov; an old woman is all very well, but don’t you, her tender husband, desert her; sit beside her, you may be of use; Marya Ignatyevna won’t drive you away, I fancy.… There, there, I was only laughing.”