‘What are you saying, Stiva? You are laughing at me. Why do you always make fun of me?’
‘Well, if you think I am jesting you must have it as you please. But tell me all the same how you live, and how you have lived your life.’
‘I? I have lived a very nasty, horrible life, and now God is punishing me as I deserve. I live so wretchedly, so wretchedly...’
‘How was it with your marriage? How did you live with your husband?’
‘It was all bad. I married because I fell in love in the nastiest way. Papa did not approve. But I would not listen to anything and just got married. Then instead of helping my husband I tormented him by my jealousy, which I could not restrain.’
‘I heard that he drank...’
‘Yes, but I did not give him any peace. I always reproached him, though you know it is a disease! He could not refrain from it. I now remember how I tried to prevent his having it, and the frightful scenes we had!’
And she looked at Kasatsky with beautiful eyes, suffering from the remembrance.
Kasatsky remembered how he had been told that Pashenka’s husband used to beat her, and now, looking at her thin withered neck with prominent veins behind her ears, and her scanty coil of hair, half grey half auburn, he seemed to see just how it had occurred.
‘Then I was left with two children and no means at all.’