“I saw before me! (Oh, not in the flesh! Would that the vision had been true!) I saw before me Matryosha, emaciated, with feverish eyes, in every point exactly as she was when she stood on the threshold of my room and, shaking her head at me, threatened me with her tiny fist. Nothing has ever been so agonizing to me! The pitiable despair of a helpless creature[48] with an unformed mind, threatening me (with what? what could she do to me, O Lord?), but blaming, of course, herself alone! Nothing like that has ever happened to me. I sat, till night came, without moving, having lost count of time. Is this what they call remorse or repentance? I do not know, and even now cannot say.[49] But it was intolerable to me, that image of her standing on the threshold with her raised and threatening little fist, merely that vision of her then, that moment ‘then,’ that shaking of her head. It is precisely that which I cannot endure, because since then it has come to me almost every day. Not that it comes itself, but that I bring it before myself and cannot help bringing it, although I can’t live with it. Oh, if I could ever see her in the flesh, even though it were an hallucination![50] Footnote 48: After “creature” is struck out: “of ten years.” Footnote 49: After “even now” is struck out: “The recollection of the deed itself is perhaps not even now loathsome to me. Perhaps the memory of it even now contains something which is gratifying to my passions.” Footnote 50: After “hallucination” is struck out: “I have other old memories, perhaps, worse than this. There was a woman whom I treated worse, and she died of it. I killed two men in a duel who had done me no harm. I was once mortally insulted, and did not avenge myself. I have it to my account that I poisoned some one, deliberately and successfully, without being found out. If necessary, I will confess it all.” “Why, then, do no other of the memories of my life rouse in me anything like this?—and I had indeed many memories, perhaps much worse in the judgment of men. They rouse merely hatred in me, and that only because they are stimulated by my present state; but formerly I forgot them callously and dismissed them from my mind. “I wandered after that for nearly the whole of the following year, and tried to find some occupation. I know I can dismiss the thought of Matryosha even now whenever I want to. I am as completely master of my will as ever. But the whole point is that I never wanted to do it; I myself do not want to, and never shall.[51] So it will go on until I go mad. Footnote 51: After “shall” is struck out: “of this I am perfectly sure.”