"You needn't pray for me if you take the veil," he said one day with a mocking smile. "I'll manage my own sins alone." She looked at him full of fear and sadness. "Ilya, don't make a jest of it!" "But I mean it." "You don't believe that I shall go to a nunnery? You'll see, then you'll believe." "Not at all--I believe you; lots of people turn monks or nuns out of sheer wickedness." Olympiada grew angry with him and they quarrelled fiercely. "You unlucky, proud man!" she cried, with sparkling eyes. "Just wait! However you stiffen your back in your pride, you'll be bent down! What are you so proud of? Your youth and your beauty? It will all go--all, and then you'll creep on the ground like a snake and beg for mercy. 'Have pity!' and no one will care." She heaped reproaches on him, and her eyes grew so bloodshot that it seemed as though great drops of blood instead of tears would flow over her cheeks. When they quarrelled she never spoke of Poluektov's murder, indeed, in her better moments she would bid him "forget." Lunev wondered at this, and asked her one day after a quarrel: "Lipa! tell me, when you're angry, why do you never speak of the old man." She answered readily: "Because that was really neither my doing nor yours. Since they haven't found you out, it must have been his fate. You were the instrument, not the force; you had no reason to strangle him, as you say yourself. So he only met his due punishment through you." Ilya laughed incredulously. "O--Oh! I thought that a man must either be a fool or a rascal--ha! ha! Anything is right for him if only he wants to do it, and in the same way anything can be wrong." "I don't understand," said Olympiada, and shook her head. "Where's the difficulty?" asked Ilya, sighing and shrugging his shoulders. "It's quite simple! Show me any one thing in life that holds for every one; find anything that a clever man can't make either right or wrong; anything that stands fast, permanent; you can't. That is what I meant to say. There is nothing fixed in life; it is all changing and confused, like a man's own soul--yes." "I don't understand," said the woman after a pause. "And I understand so well," answered Ilya. "That this is just the knot that strangles us all." At last, after one of the periodical quarrels, when Ilya had not been near Olympiada for four days, he received a letter from her; she wrote: