“What do you want now? To live? Live how? Live as you live at the courts when the usher booms out: ‘The judge is coming!’⁠ ⁠… The judge is coming, the judge is coming,” he repeated to himself. “Here he is, the judge! But I’m not to blame!” he shrieked in fury. “What’s it for?” And he left off crying, and turning with his face to the wall, fell to pondering always on the same question, “What for, why all this horror?”

But however much he pondered, he could not find an answer. And whenever the idea struck him, as it often did, that it all came of his never having lived as he ought, he thought of all the correctness of his life and dismissed this strange idea.