Book 1 Chapter 36 Nekhludoff Endeavours to Visit Maslova

"Come in, please. . . . What is it you want?"

"I want to see a prisoner in this prison."

"A political one, I suppose?"

"No, not a political one. I have a permission from the
Procureur."

"Well, I don't know, and papa is out; but come in, please," she
said, again, "or else speak to the assistant. He is in the office
at present; apply there. What is your name?"

"I thank you," said Nekhludoff, without answering her question,
and went out.

The door was not yet closed after him when the same lively tones
recommenced. In the courtyard Nekhludoff met an officer with
bristly moustaches, and asked for the assistant-inspector. It was
the assistant himself. He looked at the order of admittance, but
said that he could not decide to let him in with a pass for the
preliminary prison. Besides, it was too late. "Please to come
again to-morrow. To morrow, at 10, everybody is allowed to go in.
Come then, and the inspector himself will be at home. Then you
can have the interview either in the common room or, if the
inspector allows it, in the office."

And so Nekhludoff did not succeed in getting an interview that
day, and returned home. As he went along the streets, excited at
the idea of meeting her, he no longer thought about the Law
Courts, but recalled his conversations with the Procureur and the
inspector's assistant. The fact that he had been seeking an
interview with her, and had told the Procureur, and had been in
two prisons, so excited him that it was long before he could calm
down. When he got home he at once fetched out his diary, that had
long remained untouched, read a few sentences out of it, and then
wrote as follows: "For two years I have not written anything in my diary, and
thought I never should return to this childishness. Yet it is not
childishness, but converse with my own self, with this real
divine self which lives in every man. All this time that I slept
there was no one for me to converse with. I was awakened by an
extraordinary event on the 28th of April, in the Law Court, when
I was on the jury. I saw her in the prisoners' dock, the Katusha
betrayed by me, in a prisoner's cloak, condemned to penal
servitude through a strange mistake, and my own fault. I have
just been to the Procureur's and to the prison, but I was not
admitted. I have resolved to do all I can to see her, to confess
to her, and to atone for my sin, even by a marriage. God help me.
My soul is at peace and I am full of joy."