11 The Brothers Karamazov
slightly swaying gait common in women of full figure. She
looked steadily at the President, turning her eyes neither to
the right nor to the left. To my thinking she looked very
handsome at that moment, and not at all pale, as the la-
dies alleged afterwards. They declared, too, that she had a
concentrated and spiteful expression. I believe that she was
simply irritated and painfully conscious of the contemptu-
ous and inquisitive eyes of our scandal-loving public. She
was proud and could not stand contempt. She was one of
those people who flare up, angry and eager to retaliate, at
the mere suggestion of contempt. There was an element of
timidity, too, of course, and inward shame at her own ti-
midity, so it was not strange that her tone kept changing. At
one moment it was angry, contemptuous and rough, and
at another there was a sincere note of self-condemnation.
Sometimes she spoke as though she were taking a desper-
ate plunge; as though she felt, ‘I don’t care what happens,
I’ll say it....’ Apropos of her acquaintance with Fyodor Pav-
lovitch, she remarked curtly, ‘That’s all nonsense, and was
it my fault that he would pester me?’ But a minute later she
added, ‘It was all my fault. I was laughing at them both — at
the old man and at him, too — and I brought both of them
to this. It was all on account of me it happened.’
Samsonov’s name came up somehow. ‘That’s nobody’s
business,’ she snapped at once, with a sort of insolent de-
fiance. ‘He was my benefactor; he took me when I hadn’t a
shoe to my foot, when my family had turned me out.’ The
President reminded her, though very politely, that she must
answer the questions directly, without going off into irrel-