Book 1 Chapter 44 Maslovas View of Life

And in this manner Maslova had formed her views of life and of
her own position. She was a prostitute condemned to Siberia, and
yet she had a conception of life which made it possible for her
to be satisfied with herself, and even to pride herself on her
position before others.

According to this conception, the highest good for all men
without exception--old, young, schoolboys, generals, educated and
uneducated, was connected with the relation of the sexes;
therefore, all men, even when they pretended to be occupied with
other things, in reality took this view. She was an attractive
woman, and therefore she was an important and necessary person.
The whole of her former and present life was a confirmation of
the correctness of this conception.

With such a view of life, she was by no means the lowest, but a
very important person. And Maslova prized this view of life more
than anything; she could not but prize it, for, if she lost the
importance that such a view of life gave her among men, she would
lose the meaning of her life. And, in order not to lose the
meaning of her life, she instinctively clung to the set that
looked at life in the same way as she did. Feeling that
Nekhludoff wanted to lead her out into another world, she
resisted him, foreseeing that she would have to lose her place in
life, with the self-possession and self-respect it gave her. For
this reason she drove from her the recollections of her early
youth and her first relations with Nekhludoff. These
recollections did not correspond with her present conception of
the world, and were therefore quite rubbed out of her mind, or,
rather, lay somewhere buried and untouched, closed up and
plastered over so that they should not escape, as when bees, in
order to protect the result of their labour, will sometimes
plaster a nest of worms. Therefore, the present Nekhludoff was
not the man she had once loved with a pure love, but only a rich
gentleman whom she could, and must, make use of, and with whom
she could only have the same relations as with men in general.