"My God!" cried Sonia, "let's go at once...."
And she snatched up her cape.
"It's everlastingly the same thing!" said Raskolnikov, irritably.
"You've no thought except for them!
Stay a little with me."
"But...
Katerina Ivanovna?"
"You won't lose Katerina Ivanovna, you may be sure, she'll come to you herself since she has run out," he added peevishly.
"If she doesn't find you here, you'll be blamed for it...."
Sonia sat down in painful suspense.
Raskolnikov was silent, gazing at the floor and deliberating.
"This time Luzhin did not want to prosecute you," he began, not looking at Sonia, "but if he had wanted to, if it had suited his plans, he would have sent you to prison if it had not been for Lebeziatnikov and me.
Ah?"
"Yes," she assented in a faint voice. "Yes," she repeated, preoccupied and distressed.
"But I might easily not have been there.
And it was quite an accident Lebeziatnikov's turning up."
Sonia was silent.
"And if you'd gone to prison, what then?
Do you remember what I said yesterday?"
Again she did not answer.
He waited.
"I thought you would cry out again 'don't speak of it, leave off.'" Raskolnikov gave a laugh, but rather a forced one.
"What, silence again?" he asked a minute later.
"We must talk about something, you know.
It would be interesting for me to know how you would decide a certain 'problem' as Lebeziatnikov would say." (He was beginning to lose the thread.) "No, really, I am serious.
Imagine, Sonia, that you had known all Luzhin's intentions beforehand. Known, that is, for a fact, that they would be the ruin of Katerina Ivanovna and the children and yourself thrown in--since you don't count yourself for anything--Polenka too... for she'll go the same way.
Well, if suddenly it all depended on your decision whether he or they should go on living, that is whether Luzhin should go on living and doing wicked things, or Katerina Ivanovna should die?
How would you decide which of them was to die?
I ask you?"
Sonia looked uneasily at him. There was something peculiar in this hesitating question, which seemed approaching something in a roundabout way.
"I felt that you were going to ask some question like that," she said, looking inquisitively at him.
"I dare say you did. But how is it to be answered?"
"Why do you ask about what could not happen?" said Sonia reluctantly.
"Then it would be better for Luzhin to go on living and doing wicked things?
You haven't dared to decide even that!"
"But I can't know the Divine Providence....
And why do you ask what can't be answered?
What's the use of such foolish questions?
How could it happen that it should depend on my decision--who has made me a judge to decide who is to live and who is not to live?"
"Oh, if the Divine Providence is to be mixed up in it, there is no doing anything," Raskolnikov grumbled morosely.
"You'd better say straight out what you want!" Sonia cried in distress. "You are leading up to something again....
Can you have come simply to torture me?"
She could not control herself and began crying bitterly.
He looked at her in gloomy misery.
Five minutes passed.
"Of course you're right, Sonia," he said softly at last.
He was suddenly changed. His tone of assumed arrogance and helpless defiance was gone.
Even his voice was suddenly weak.
"I told you yesterday that I was not coming to ask forgiveness and almost the first thing I've said is to ask forgiveness....
I said that about Luzhin and Providence for my own sake.