Book 1 Chapter 37 Maslova Recalls the Past

That night Maslova lay awake a long time with her eyes open
looking at the door, in front of which the deacon's daughter kept
passing. She was thinking that nothing would induce her to go to
the island of Sakhalin and marry a convict, but would arrange
matters somehow with one of the prison officials, the secretary,
a warder, or even a warder's assistant. "Aren't they all given
that way? Only I must not get thin, or else I am lost."

She thought of how the advocate had looked at her, and also the
president, and of the men she met, and those who came in on
purpose at the court. She recollected how her companion, Bertha,
who came to see her in prison, had told her about the student
whom she had "loved" while she was with Kitaeva, and who had
inquired about her, and pitied her very much. She recalled many
to mind, only not Nekhludoff. She never brought back to mind the
days of her childhood and youth, and her love to Nekhludoff.
That would have been too painful. These memories lay untouched
somewhere deep in her soul; she had forgotten him, and never
recalled and never even dreamt of him. To-day, in the court, she
did not recognise him, not only because when she last saw him he
was in uniform, without a beard, and had only a small moustache
and thick, curly, though short hair, and now was bald and
bearded, but because she never thought about him. She had buried
his memory on that terrible dark night when he, returning from
the army, had passed by on the railway without stopping to call
on his aunts. Katusha then knew her condition. Up to that night
she did not consider the child that lay beneath her heart a
burden. But on that night everything changed, and the child
became nothing but a weight.