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“This is not my own fantastical opinion—many people have thought the same; but I feel it so deeply that I’ll tell you what I think: I believe that to execute a man for murder is to punish him immeasurably more dreadfully than is equivalent to his crime. A murder by sentence is far more dreadful than a murder committed by a criminal.
It was true that she was lonely in her present life; Totski had judged her thoughts aright; she longed to rise, if not to love, at least to family life and new hopes and objects, but as to Gavrila Ardalionovitch, she could not as yet say much. She thought it must be the case that he loved her; she felt that she too might learn to love him, if she could be sure of the firmness of his attachment to herself, but he was very young, it was a difficult question to decide. What she specially liked about him was that he worked, and supported his family by his toil.
Mrs. General Epanchin was a jealous woman, and a proud woman by nature. What must her feelings have been when she heard that Prince Muishkin, the last of his and her own line, had arrived in beggar’s guise, a wretched idiot, a recipient of charity—all of which details the general gave out for greater effect; he was anxious to steal her interest at the first swoop, so as to distract her thoughts from other matters nearer home.
