“Oh, I don’t know,” cried Sonia, almost in despair, and she put her hands to her head.
It was evident that that idea had very often occurred to her before and he had only roused it again.
“And, what, if even now, while Katerina Ivanovna is alive, you get ill and are taken to the hospital, what will happen then?” he persisted pitilessly.
“How can you? That cannot be!”
And Sonia’s face worked with awful terror.
“Cannot be?” Raskolnikov went on with a harsh smile. “You are not insured against it, are you? What will happen to them then? They will be in the street, all of them, she will cough and beg and knock her head against some wall, as she did to-day, and the children will cry.... Then she will fall down, be taken to the police station and to the hospital, she will die, and the childr
