I love her more than she thinks, and if she really loves me as I love her, she certainly would sacrifice her pleasure to me.
It’s true she lets me go herself, but I see from her face that she hates doing it, so that it comes to the same thing as if she didn’t let me.”
“Oh, there’s something behind that,” cried Katya, turning to me again with flashing, angry eyes.
“Own up, Alyosha, own up at once, it’s your father who has put all that into your head.
He’s been talking to you today, hasn’t he?
And please don’t try and deceive me: I shall find out directly!
Is it so or not?”
“Yes, he has been talking,” Alyosha answered in confusion, “what of it?
He talked in such a kind and friendly way today, and kept praising her to me. I was quite surprised, in fact, that he should praise her like that after she had insulted him so.”
“And you, you believed it?” said I. “You, for whom she has given up everything she could give up! And even now, this very day, all her anxiety was on your account, that you might not be bored, that you might not be deprived of the possibility of seeing Katerina Fyodorovna.
She said that to me today herself.
And you believe those false insinuations at once.
Aren’t you ashamed?”
“Ungrateful boy!
But that’s just it. He’s never ashamed of anything,” said Katya, dismissing him with a wave of her hand, as though he were lost beyond all hope.
“But really, how you talk!” Alyosha continued in a plaintive voice.
“And you’re always like that, Katya!
You’re always suspecting me of something bad... . . I don’t count, Ivan Petrovitch!
You think I don’t love Natasha.
I didn’t mean that when I said she was an egoist.
I only meant that she loves me too much, so that it’s all out of proportion, and I suffer for it, and she too.
And my father never does influence me, though he’s tried to.
I don’t let him.
He didn’t say she was an egoist in any bad sense; I understood him.
He said exactly what I said just now: that she loves me so much, too much, so intensely, that it amounts to simple egoism and that that makes me suffer and her too, and that I shall suffer even more hereafter.
He told the truth, and spoke from love of me, and it doesn’t at all follow that he meant anything offensive to Natasha; on the contrary, he saw the strength of her love, her immense, almost incredible love . . .”
But Katya interrupted him and would not let him finish.
She began hotly upbraiding him, and maintaining that the prince had only praised Natasha to deceive him by a show of kindness, all in order to destroy their attachment, with the idea of invisibly and imperceptibly turning Alyosha against her.
Warmly and cleverly she argued that Natasha loved him, that no love could forgive the way he was treating her, and that he himself, Alyosha, was the real egoist.
Little by little Katya reduced him to utter misery and complete penitence. He sat beside us, utterly crushed, staring at the floor with a look of suffering on his face and gave up attempting to answer.
But Katya was relentless.
I kept looking at her with the greatest interest.
I was eager to get to know this strange girl.
She was quite a child, but a strange child, a child of convictions, with steadfast principles, and with a passionate, innate love of goodness and justice.
If one really might call her a child she belonged to that class of thinking children who are fairly numerous in our Russian families.
It was evident that she had pondered on many subjects.
It would have been interesting to peep into that little pondering head and to see the mixture there of quite childish images and fancies with serious ideas and notions gained from experience of life (for Katya really had lived), and at the same time with ideas of which she had no real knowledge or experience, abstract theories she had got out of books, though she probably mistook them for generalizations gained by her own experience. These abstract ideas must have been very numerous.
In the course of that evening and subsequently I studied her, I believe, pretty thoroughly; her heart was ardent and receptive.
In some cases she, as it were, disdained selfcontrol, putting genuineness before everything, and looking upon every restraint on life as a conventional prejudice. And she seemed to pride herself on that conviction, which is often the case indeed with persons of ardent temperament, even in those who are not very young.
But it was just that that gave her a peculiar charm.
She was very fond of thinking and getting at the truth of things, but was so far from being pedantic, so full of youthful ways that from the first moment one began to love all these originalities in her, and to accept them.
I thought of Levinka and Borinka, and it seemed to me that that was all in the natural order of things.
And, strange to say, her face, in which I had seen nothing particularly handsome at first sight, seemed that evening to grow finer and more attractive every minute.
This naive combination in her of the child and the thinking woman, this childlike and absolutely genuine thirst for truth and justice, and absolute faith in her impulses – all this lighted up her face with a fine glow of sincerity, giving it a lofty, spiritual beauty, and one began to understand that it was not so easy to gauge the full significance of that beauty which was not all at once apparent to every ordinary unsympathetic eye.
And I realized that Alyosha was bound to be passionately attached to her.
If he was himself incapable of thought and reasoning he was especially attracted by those who could do his thinking, and even wishing, for him, and Katya had already taken him under her wing.
His heart was generous, and it instantly surrendered without a struggle to everything that was fine and honourable. And Katya had spoken openly of many things before him already with sympathy and all the sincerity of a child.
He was absolutely without a will of his own. She had a very great deal of strong, insistent, and fervidly concentrated will; and Alyosha would only attach himself to one who could dominate and even command him.
It was partly through this that Natasha had attracted him at the beginning of their relations, but Katya had a great advantage over Natasha in the fact that she was still a child herself and seemed likely to remain so for a long time.
This childishness, her bright intelligence, and at the same time a certain lack of judgement, all this made her more akin to Alyosha.