to avoid being seen by her, and shut the door after him.  In this drawing-room his mother had died three months before.  On entering the room, in which two lamps with reflectors were burning, one lighting up his father’s and the other his mother’s portrait, he remembered what his last relations with his mother had been.  And they also seemed shameful and horrid.  He remembered how, during the latter period of her illness, he had simply wished her to die.  He had said to himself that he wished it for her sake, that she might be released from her suffering, but in reality he wished to be released from the sight of her sufferings for his own sake.

Trying to recall a pleasant image of her, he went up to look at her portrait, painted by a celebrated artist for 800 roubles.  She was depicted in a very low-necked black velvet dress.  There was something very revolting and blasphemous in this representation of his mother as a half-nude beauty.  It was all the more disgusting because three months ago, in this very room, lay this same woman, dried up to a mummy.  And he remembered how a few days before her death she clasped his hand with her bony, discoloured fingers, looked into his eyes, and said:  “Do not judge me, Mitia, if I have not done what I should,” and how the tears came into her eyes, grown pale with suffering.

“Ah, how horrid!” he said to himself, looking up once more at the half-naked woman, with the splendid marble shoulders and arms, and the triumphant smile on her lips.  “Oh, how horrid!” The bared shoulders of the portrait reminded him of another, a young woman, whom he had seen exposed in the same way a few days before.  It was Missy, who had devised an excuse for calling him into her room just as she was ready to go to a ball, so that he should see her in her ball dress.  It was with disgust that he remembered her fine shoulders and arms.  “And that father of hers, with his doubtful past and his cruelties, and the bel-esprit her mother, with her doubtful reputation.”  All this disgusted him, and also made him feel ashamed.  “Shameful and horrid; horrid and shameful!”

“No, no,” he thought; “freedom from all these false relations with the Korchagins and Mary Vasilievna and the inheritance and from all the rest must be got.  Oh, to breathe freely, to go abroad, to Rome and work at my picture!” He remembered the doubts he had about his talent for art.  “Well, never mind; only just to breathe freely.  First Constantinople, then Rome.  Only just to get through with this jury business, and arrange with the advocate first.”

Then suddenly there arose in his mind an extremely vivid picture of a prisoner with black, slightly-squinting eyes, and how she began to cry when the last words of the prisoners had been heard; and he hurriedly put out his cigarette, pressing it into the ash-pan, lit another, and began pacing up and down the room.  One after another the scenes he had lived through with her rose in his mind.  He recalled that last