Page:Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse by Paul Selver.djvu/146

122 no. Dostoyevsky is not a parochial schoolmaster of that sort. I got to know him otherwise

I did not seek Sonia, but I found her Sonia's name was Marie, but in that house she had been patriotically re-christened Vlasta, and she was sixteen or seventeen years old. She was delicately made and fair-haired, and her colouring was so pronouncedly vivid, that she seemed to have been moulded in sugar and tinted by an adept at painting, who knew naught of shades and nuances, but had put a full red on the face, an honest summer azure upon the eyes, cinnabar upon the lips and the ideal whiteness of the human body upon the brow and temples. Her hair was dyed yellow—the lurid yellowness of straw; later, when she stopped colouring it, I saw that it was chestnut

We sat facing each other; I looked at her and felt sorry for her. It was half because of promptings from Raskolnikov, half really because of the circumstances under which I was vegetating. We seized each other's hands and she made her confession. At an early age she had lost her mother. Her father was a teacher, and through his grief at her mother's death he had begun to drink and play cards. Then they had driven him from his post. She had been seduced by some student or other on a summer night in the