“You know quite well, but you are pretending to be ignorant,” said Aglaya, very low, with her eyes on the ground.
“Why should I?” asked Nastasia Philipovna, smiling slightly.
“You want to take advantage of my position, now that I am in your house,” continued Aglaya, awkwardly.
“For that position you are to blame and not I,” said Nastasia, flaring up suddenly. “ I did not invite you , but you me; and to this moment I am quite ignorant as to why I am thus honoured.”
Aglaya raised her head haughtily.
“Restrain your tongue!” she said. “I did not come here to fight you with your own weapons.”
“Oh! then you did come ‘to fight,’ I may conclude? Dear me!—and I thought you were cleverer—”
They looked at one another with undisguised malice. One of these women had written to the other, so lately, such letters as we have seen; and it all was dispersed at their first meeting. Yet it appeared that not one of the four persons in the room considered this in any degree strange.
The prince who, up to yesterday, would not have believed that he could even dream of such an impossible scene as this, stood and listened and looked on, and felt as though he had long foreseen it all. The most fantastic dream seemed suddenly to have been metamorphosed into the most vivid reality.
One of these women so despised the other, and so longed to express her contempt for her (perhaps she had only come for that very purpose, as Rogojin said next day), that howsoever fantastical was the other woman, howsoever afflicted her spirit and disturbed her understanding, no