Sonia, “but if he had wanted to, if it had suited his plans, he would have sent you to prison if it had not been for Lebeziatnikov and me. Ah?”
“Yes,” she assented in a faint voice. “Yes,” she repeated, preoccupied and distressed.
“But I might easily not have been there. And it was quite an accident Lebeziatnikov’s turning up.”
Sonia was silent.
“And if you’d gone to prison, what then? Do you remember what I said yesterday?”
Again she did not answer. He waited.
“I thought you would cry out again ‘don’t speak of it, leave off.’ ” Raskolnikov gave a laugh, but rather a forced one. “What, silence again?” he asked a minute later. “We must talk about something, you know. It would be interesting for me to know how you would decide a certain ‘problem’ as Lebeziatnikov would say.” (He was beginning