Free Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Page B

but actually turned her out of his house, stamping his foot and calling her indecent names, on the pretext that the shirt collars were the wrong size and not cut straight. And there are the little ones with no food in their bellies… And there's Katerina Ivanovna wringing her hands, pacing up and down the room, and saying, with the red spots standing out on her cheeks, as they invariably do in that illness: “You live with us, you female parasite, you eat our food and drink our drink, and take advantage of our heating!” – yet what could she have been eating and drinking when even the little ones hadn't seen a crust of bread for three days? I was lying in bed at the time… oh, what the hell, I was drunk, sir, and I heard my Sonya (she's as meek as a lamb, and has such a gentle little voice… she has fair hair, and her little face is always pale and thin), I heard my Sonya say: “Oh, no, Katerina Ivanovna, you don't want me to go and do that, do you?” Yet Darya Frantsovna, an ill-intentioned woman who's been in trouble with the police on many occasions, had already two or three times been to make inquiries through the landlady. “So what if I do?” replied Katerina Ivanovna, mockingly. “What's there to protect? Some treasure!” But don't blame her, don't blame her, dear sir, don't blame her! It was something she said when she wasn't in full possession of her faculties, she was ill and agitated, and her children hadn't had anything to eat and were crying; it was said more in order to wound than in any precise sense… For that's just the way Katerina Ivanovna is by nature: as soon as the children cry, for example, even if it's because they're hungry, she immediately starts beating them. Well, then I saw Sonechka – this would be at about six o'clock in the evening – get up, put on her shawl and her “burnous” mantlet and leave the apartment, and at nine o'clock she came back again. She came in, went straight up to Katerina Ivanovna, and silently put down thirty roubles on the table in front of her. Not one word did shesay as she did this; she didn't even give her a look; she just picked up our big, green drap-de-dames shawl 10 (we have a drap-de-dames shawl which we all make use of), completely covered her head and face with it, and lay down on her bed with her face to the wall; only her little shoulders and the rest of her body kept quivering… And meanwhile I went on lying there in the state I'd been in all along… And then, young man, I saw Katerina Ivanovna go over to Sonechka's bed, also without saying a word; all evening she kneeled before her, kissed her feet, wouldn't get up, and then they both fell asleep together, in each other's arms… both of them… both of them… yes, sir… while I… lay there drunk.’
    Marmeladov fell silent, as though his voice had been cut off by inward emotion. Then he suddenly refilled his glass in haste, drank its contents down and grunted.
    ‘Ever since then, my dear sir,’ he continued after a period of silence, ‘ever since then, because of a certain inauspicious happening and the fact that some ill-intentioned persons reported the matter to the authorities – something in which Darya Frantsovna played a leading role, apparently in order to get her own back for not having been treated with due respect – ever since then my daughter, Sofya Semyonovna, has been compelled to take the yellow card, and on account of that has been unable to remain with us. For one thing, our landlady, Amalia Ivanovna, would not allow it (though earlier she herself had given Darya Frantsovna a helping hand), and for another, Mr Lebezyatnikov… hm… Well you see, it was because of Sonya that that entire episode between him and Katerina Ivanovna took place. To start with he'd made the most persistent advances towards Sonechka, but then he went and took umbrage, saying: “How could I, a man of such enlightenment, live in the same apartment as a girl like that?” And Katerina