“‘You’ll stay the night?’ “‘I will, I will.’ “A minute later the sick man called Pavel Pavlovitch again. ‘You, you,’ he muttered, when the latter had run up and was bending over him: ‘You are much better than I am! I understand it all--all.... Thank you.’ “‘Sleep, sleep,’ whispered Pavel Pavlovitch, and he hastened on tiptoe to his sofa. “As he fell asleep, the invalid heard Pavel Pavlovitch noiselessly making a bed for himself, and taking off his clothes. Finally, putting out the candle, and almost holding his breath for fear of waking the patient, he stretched himself on his sofa.”[92] And yet, a quarter of an hour later, Velchaninov catches Trusotsky, who believes him sound asleep, bending over him with intent to murder him. “Pavel Pavlovitch wanted to kill him, but didn’t know he wanted to kill him! ‘It’s senseless, but that’s the truth,’ thought Velchaninov.”[93] And yet he is not satisfied! “‘And can it be that it was all true?’ he exclaimed again, suddenly raising his head from the pillow and opening his eyes. ‘All that madman told me yesterday about his love for me, when his chin quivered and he thumped himself on the breast with his fist?’ “‘It was the absolute truth,’ he decided, still pondering and analysing. ‘That quasimodo from T---- was quite sufficiently stupid and noble to fall in love with the lover of his wife, about whom he noticed nothing suspicious in twenty years! He had been thinking of me with respect, cherishing my memory and brooding over my “utterances” for nine years. Good Heavens! And I had no notion of it! He could not have been lying yesterday. But did he love me yesterday when he declared his feeling and said, “Let us settle our account!” Yes, it was from hatred that he loved me; that’s the strongest of all loves.... “‘... Only he didn’t know then whether he would end by embracing me or murdering me. Of course, it’s turned out that the best thing was to do both. A most natural solution’.”[94] If I have lingered so long over this slender book, it is because it is more accessible than the rest of Dostoevsky’s novels, and helps us to win, beyond love and hate, to that wider region I spoke about not long since: a region where love is not, nor passion, so easily and so simply reached: the region Schopenhauer spoke of, the meeting-place of human brotherhood, where the limits of existence fade away, where the notion of the individual and of time is lost, the place wherein Dostoevsky sought--and found--the secret of happiness. V At our last meeting I spoke of the three strata or regions Dostoevsky seems to discern in the human personality: first, the province of intellectual speculation, then the domain of the passions, midway between the former and the third region, a vast realm remote from the play of passion. It is plain that these three strata are not isolated or even strictly limited, but interpenetrate.