she herself wished to make a sacrifice for him.
“No, you have not understood me, don’t let us talk about it,” she replied, wiping away her tears.
“Maybe I do love a poor girl,” said Nikoláy to himself. “Am I to sacrifice my feelings and my honor for money? I wonder how Mamma could speak so to me. Because Sónya is poor I must not love her,” he thought, “must not respond to her faithful, devoted love? Yet I should certainly be happier with her than with some doll-like Julie. I can always sacrifice my feelings for my family’s welfare,” he said to himself, “but I can’t coerce my feelings. If I love Sónya, that feeling is for me stronger and higher than all else.”
Nikoláy did not go to Moscow, and the countess did not renew the conversation with him about marriage.
She saw with sorrow, and sometimes with exasperation, symptoms of a growing attachment between her son and the portionless Sónya.
Though she blamed herself for it, she could not refrain from grumbling at and worrying Sónya, often pulling her up without reason, addressing her stiffly as “my dear,” and using the formal “you” instead of the intimate “thou” in speaking to her.
The kindhearted countess was the more vexed with Sónya because that poor, dark-eyed niece of hers was so meek, so kind, so devotedly grateful to her benefactors, and so faithfully, unchangingly, and unselfishly in love with Nikoláy, that there were no grounds for finding fault with her.
Nikoláy was spending the last of his leave at home. A fourth letter had come from Prince Andréy, from Rome, in which he wrote that he would have been on his