“Come, let us go,” Ilyin continued. “I felt just now, as well as at the seat in the wood, that you are as helpless as I am, Sonia.⁠ ⁠… You are in the same plight! You love me and are fruitlessly trying to appease your conscience.⁠ ⁠…”

Seeing that she was moving away, he caught her by her lace cuff and said rapidly:

“If not today, then tomorrow you will have to give in! Why, then, this waste of time? My precious, darling Sonia, the sentence is passed; why put off the execution? Why deceive yourself?”

Sofya Petrovna tore herself from him and darted in at the door. Returning to the drawing room, she mechanically shut the piano, looked for a long time at the music-stand, and sat down. She could not stand up nor think. All that was left of her excitement and recklessness was a fearful weakness, apathy, and dreariness. Her conscience whispered to her that she had behaved badly, foolishly, that evening, like some madcap girl⁠—that she had just been embraced on the verandah, and still had an uneasy feeling in her waist and her elbow. There was not a soul in the drawing room; there was only one candle burning. Madame Lubyantsev sat on the round stool before the piano, motionless, as though expecting something. And as though taking advantage of the darkness and her extreme lassitude, an oppressive, overpowering desire began to assail her. Like a boa-constrictor it gripped her limbs and her soul, and grew stronger every second, and no longer menaced her as it had done, but stood clear before her in all its nakedness.