“It seems to me that you take me to be a plaything in the hands of others.”
“Yes,” said he in his irritation.
“I was ready to die, not regarding my father’s will, and you don’t appreciate it. From this moment everything is ended between us,” said she, and quickly left the room.
VIII
After these occurrences, Katerina Vasílyevna was long melancholy; but her melancholy, though developed by this state of things, was not at all attributable to this special state of things. There are characters to whom a special fact in itself has very little interest, and serves only to engender general ideas which act upon them with much greater power. If such people possess remarkably strong minds, they become reformers nowadays just as in ancient times they became great philosophers. Kant, Fichte, Hegel, never worked out private questions; it was too tedious for them. This, of course, is true only of men; women, according to the prevailing idea, have very little understanding. Nature did not give it them, just as she did not give a clean face to blacksmiths, straight backs to tailors, a delicate sense of smell to shoemakers; all this is nature. It is for this reason that there are no women of great intellect. People of weak minds and with tendency of character become phlegmatic even to apathy. People of ordinary brains are inclined to melancholy, to a quiet life, and are generally imaginative. This does not signify that they are chimerical. In a good many cases the imagination is weak and they are very positive people. They simply love a quiet revery.
Katerina Vasílyevna had been in love with Jean Sólovtsof on account of his letters. She was dying with love founded only on her imagination. It may readily be seen that she was inclined to be very romantic, and frivolous life led by the trivial people who frequented Pólozof’s house did not at all dispose her to an exalted idealism. This shows that this feature of her character arose from her own nature. She had long been burdened by the frivolity of that kind of life; she loved to read and dream. And now she was troubled not only by its frivolity, but by the wealth with which she was surrounded. It must not be thought that because she had this feeling, she had an extraordinary nature; it is common among all wealthy women of a humble and retiring character. In her it developed earlier than ordinary, simply because she had early received a powerful lesson.
“Whom shall I believe? What shall I believe?” she asked herself after the episode with Sólovtsof, and it seemed to her that nobody and nothing were worthy of her faith. Her father’s riches attracted the envious, cunning, deceitful, from the whole city. She was surrounded by avaricious men, by liars, by flatterers; every word that was said to her was calculated with a view to her father’s millions.
Her thoughts kept growing more serious. She began to get interested in the general questions arising from the wealth that troubled her so much, as well as in those arising from the poverty which troubled others. Her father gave her plenty of pin money, but like any other good woman she used it in helping the poor. But she read and thought and began to notice that such help as she could give did less good than she had reason to expect. She began to see that she was constantly deceived by feigned or knavish poverty; that people worthy of aid, able to make good use of such money, scarcely ever got any solid good from it; it lifts them temporarily out of their poverty, but in half a year or a year those people are in the same situation again. She began to think: “Why should money ruin people? Why does this importunate poverty never leave the poor? And why are there so many poor who are as unreasonable and bad as the rich?”
She was a person of imagination, but her imaginations were gentle, like her character, and there was just as little brilliancy about them as there was in herself. Her favorite author was George Sand, but she never imagined herself to be Lélia or Indiana or Cavalcanti or Consuélo; she more often imagined herself to be Jeannette or Geneviève. Geneviève was her favorite heroine. Here she is going through the field and is gathering flowers which will serve as models of her handiwork; here she meets André—such quiet meetings! Here they discover that they love each other; such were her imaginations, and she knew that they were only imaginations. And she loved to dream how enviable was the lot of Miss Nightingale, that quiet, unostentatious little woman, of whom scarcely anything was known except that she was loved by all England. Was she young? Was she rich or poor? Was she happy or unhappy? About this nothing is said, about this nothing is thought; everyone blesses the little woman, who was a ministering angel in the English hospitals of the Crimea and Skutari, and who at the end of the war, while returning to her native land with hundreds saved by her, still continued to take care of the sick. Such were the dreams whose fulfilment Katerina Vasílyevna would have liked to see. Her fancy did not carry
