VERA DUKHOVA EXPLAINS
THROUGH a door at the back of the room entered, with a wriggling gait, the thin, yellow Vera Dukhova, with her large kind eyes.
“Thanks for having come,” she said, pressing Nekhlyudov’s hand. “Do you remember me? Let us sit down.”
“I did not expect to see you like this.”
“Oh, I am very happy. It is so delightful, so delightful, that I desire nothing better,” said Vera Dukhova, with her usual expression of fright in the large, kind, round eyes fixed on Nekhlyudov, and twisting the terribly thin, sinewy neck encircled by the shabby, crumpled, dirty collar of her bodice.
Nekhlyudov asked her how she came to be in prison.
In answer she began relating all about her affairs with great animation. Her speech was intermingled with many special words, such as propaganda, disorganisation, social groups, sections and sub-sections, about which she seemed to think everybody knew, but which Nekhlyudov had never heard of. She told him all the secrets of the Narodovolstvo, evidently convinced that he was pleased to hear them. Nekhlyudov looked at her miserable little neck, her thin, unkempt hair, and wondered why she had been doing all these strange things, and why she was now telling all this to him. He pitied her, but not as he had pitied Menshov, the peasant, kept in this stinking prison for no fault of his own. She was pitiable because of the confusion that filled her mind. It was clear that she considered herself a heroine ready to lay down her life for the success of her cause; yet she could hardly have explained what that cause was, or in what its success consisted.