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The Awakening of Lazarus 111to an insolent man that he was not worth your little finger…andthat I did my sister honor by seating her beside you.”“Ach, you said that to them? And in her presence?” cried Soniafrightened. “Sit down with me! An honor! Why, I’m…dishonorable…Ah,why did you say that?”“It was not because of your dishonor and your sin I said thatof you, but because of your great suffering. But you are a greatsinner, that’s true,” he added almost solemnly, “and your worstsin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.Isn’t that fearful? Isn’t it fearful that you are living in this filth thatyou loathe so, and at the same time you know yourself (you’veonly to open your eyes) that you are not helping anyone or savinganyone from anything! Tell me,” he went on almost in a frenzy,“how this shame and degradation can exist in you side by sidewith other, opposite, holy feelings? It would be better, a thousandtimes better and wiser, to leap into the water and end it all!”“But what would become of them?” Sonia asked faintly, gazingat him with eyes of anguish, but not seeming surprised at hissuggestion.Raskolnikov looked strangely at her. He read it all in her face;so she must have had that thought already, perhaps many times,and in her despair had thought out in detail how to end it andso earnestly that now she scarcely wondered at his suggestion.She had not even noticed the cruelty of his words. (The significanceof his reproaches and his peculiar attitude to her shameshe had, of course, not noticed either, and that too was clear tohim.) But he saw how monstrously the thought of her disgraceful,shameful position was torturing her and had long torturedher. “What, what,” he thought, “could hitherto have hinderedher from putting an end to it?” Only then he realized what thosepoor little orphan children and that pitiful half-crazy Katerina