“She may have been on the verge of tears, but something different happened. Lifting her thin little hand, she gave the student a slap in the face which could not have been more dexterously delivered. It did come with a smack! He would have rushed at her, swearing, but I held him back, and the girl had time to run away. We began quarrelling at once. I told him all that I had been saving up against him in those days. I told him that he was the paltriest commonplace fool without the trace of an idea. He swore at me.... (I had once explained to him that I was illegitimate.) Then we spat at each other, and I’ve never seen him since. I felt frightfully vexed with myself that evening, but not so much the next day, and by the day after that had quite forgotten it. And though I sometimes thought of the girl again, it was only casually, for a moment. It was only after I’d been a fortnight in Petersburg I suddenly recalled the whole scene. I remembered it, and I was suddenly so ashamed that tears of shame literally ran down my cheeks. I was wretched the whole evening, and all that night, and I am rather miserable about it now. I could not understand at first how I could have sunk to such a depth of degradation, and still less how I could have forgotten it without feeling shame or remorse. It is only now that I understand what was at the root of it; it was all due to my ‘_idea_.’... The ‘_idea_’ comforted me in disgrace and insignificance. But all the nasty things I did took refuge, as it were, under the ‘_idea_.’ It, so to speak, smoothed over everything, but it also put a mist before my eyes, and such a misty understanding of things and events may, of course, be a great hindrance to the ‘_idea_’ itself, to say nothing of other things. “Now for another anecdote. “On the 1st of April last year, Marie Ivanovna was keeping her name day; some visitors, though only a few, came for the evening. Suddenly Agrafena rushed in, out of breath, announcing that a baby was crying in the passage before the kitchen, and that she didn’t know what to do. We were all excited at the news. We went out and saw a bark basket, and in the basket a three- or four-week-old child, crying. I picked up the basket and took it into the kitchen. Then I immediately found a folded note: “‘Gracious benefactors, show kind charity to the girl christened Arina, and we will join with her to send our tears to the Heavenly Throne for you for ever, and congratulate you on your name day. “‘Persons unknown to you.’