“But I am alive still. Now what’s to be done? what’s to be done?” he said in despair. He lighted a candle, got up cautiously and went to the looking-glass, and began looking at his face and hair. Yes, there were gray hairs about his temples. He opened his mouth. His back teeth were beginning to decay. He bared his muscular arms. Yes, there was strength in them. But Nikolay, who lay there breathing with what was left of lungs, had had a strong, healthy body too. And suddenly he recalled how they used to go to bed together as children, and how they only waited till Fyodor Bogdanitch was out of the room to fling pillows at each other and laugh, laugh irrepressibly, so that even their awe of Fyodor Bogdanitch could not check the effervescing, overbrimming sense of life and happiness. “And now that bent, hollow chest⁠ ⁠… and I, not knowing what will become of me, or wherefore.⁠ ⁠…”

“K⁠ ⁠… ha! K⁠ ⁠… ha! Damnation! Why do you keep fidgeting, why don’t you go to sleep?” his brother’s voice called to him.

“Oh, I don’t know, I’m not sleepy.”