His knees trembled; his feelings, his thoughts burned; a flash of joy pierced his heart with unbearable sharpness. No, this was no dream! Heavens, how much happiness in one second of time! Such a wondrous life in a couple of minutes!

But was this not all a dream? Could she—for one of whose divine looks he was ready to give his whole life, to approach whose abode he felt was indescribable bliss—could she now be so well disposed and attentive to him? He bounded up the stairs. He experienced no earthly thought; he was not warmed with the flame of earthly passion—no, he was in that moment chaste and pure as a virgin youth still inhaling the vague spiritual need for love. And a thing which would have aroused crude ideas in a dissolute person, on the contrary inspired him all the more. The trust which a beautiful frail being had bestowed on him, this trust laid upon him a vow of knightly strictness, a vow of slavery to fulfill her every command. He only wished that these commands might be as difficult as possible to accomplish, so that he might fly to attain them, exerting all his strength. He did not doubt that some mysterious and portentous occurrence had forced the stranger to entrust herself to him; that he would probably be asked to do an important service, and he already felt within himself a strength and determination for anything.

The staircase wound ahead and his swift thoughts wound with it. “Careful how you go!” rang out a voice like a harp and filled his veins with fresh excitement. In the dark heights of the fourth floor, the stranger knocked at a door; it was opened and they went in together. A rather good-looking woman met them with a candle in her hand, but she gave Piskarev such an odd and brazen look that he dropped his eyes involuntarily. They entered a room. Three female figures met his gaze in different corners of the apartment. One was laying out some cards; another sat at the piano and played some sort of pathetic approach to an ancient polonaise on two fingers; a third sat before a mirror, combing her long hair and making no attempt to interrupt her toilet on the entrance of an unknown person. There reigned over everything a kind of unpleasant disorder which one usually meets only in the uncared-for room of a bachelor. The furniture which was rather good, was covered in dust; a spider had overspread the sculptured cornice with his web; through an unlatched door into another room shone a boot with a spur and the braid of a red uniform; a loud male voice and a woman’s laughter rang out quite unrestrainedly.

Heavens, where had he come! At first he refused to believe what he saw and began to gaze more steadily at the objects which filled the room; but the bare walls and uncurtained windows showed no trace of the presence of a careful housewife; the worn faces of these pitiful creatures, one of whom sat down almost under his nose and began examining him as calmly as a spot on someone else’s dress, all this convinced him that he had entered the repulsive asylum where pitiful depravity makes its home, born of the pinchbeck morality and terrible overcrowding of the capital—the asylum where man has sacrilegiously crushed and mocked everything pure and holy which embellishes life, where woman, the beauty of the world and crown of creation, has become a strange ambiguous being, where she has become deprived of the purity of her soul and of everything feminine and has acquired repellently the manners and boldness of a man and ceased to be the weak and beautiful being so distinct from us. Piskarev measured her from head to foot with astounded eyes, as if trying to make quite certain whether she was really the woman who had so bewitched him and so carried him away on the Nevski Prospect. But she stood before him as lovely as ever; her hair was as beautiful; her eyes still seemed divine. She was fresh; she was only seventeen years old; one could see that this awful depravity had only recently overtaken her. He still did not dare to touch her cheeks, they were fresh and faintly flushed—she was beautiful.

He stood motionless before her and was ready to forget himself as naively as he had forgotten himself before. But the beautiful girl grew tired of this long silence and she smiled meaningly straight into his eyes. This smile was full of a kind of pathetic insolence: it was as odd and as alien to her face as an expression of piety in an extortioner or an account-book to a poet. He shuddered. She opened her pretty lips and began saying something, but it was all so stupid and so trite.... As though intellect abandons a person when chastity goes. He no longer wanted to hear anything. He was extremely droll and simple, like a child. Instead of making use of such affability, instead of being delighted with this chance which would undoubtedly have delighted anyone else in his place, he turned like a wild goat and rushed out into the street.

With bowed head and arms hanging at his sides, he sat in his room like a miserable soul who has found a priceless pearl and dropped it into the ocean. “Such a beautiful woman, such heavenly features! And where is she? In what place? . . .” That was all he could manage to say.

It is true that we are never so filled with pity as at the sight of beauty touched by the pestilential breath of depravity.