Book 1 Chapter 55 Vera Doukhova Explains

Through a door, at the back of the room, entered, with a
wriggling gait, the thin, yellow Vera Doukhova, with her large,
kind eyes.

"Thanks for having come," she said, pressing Nekhludoff's hand.
"Do you remember me? Let us sit down."

"I did not expect to see you like this."

"Oh, I am very happy. It is so delightful, so delightful, that I
desire nothing better," said Vera Doukhova, with the usual
expression of fright in the large, kind, round eyes fixed on
Nekhludoff, and twisting the terribly thin, sinewy neck,
surrounded by the shabby, crumpled, dirty collar of her bodice.
Nekhludoff asked her how she came to be in prison.

In answer she began relating all about her affairs with great
animation. Her speech was intermingled with a great many long
words, such as propaganda, disorganisation, social groups,
sections and sub-sections, about which she seemed to think
everybody knew, but which Nekhludoff had never heard of.

She told him all the secrets of the Nardovolstvo, [literally,
"People's Freedom," a revolutionary movement] evidently
convinced that he was pleased to hear them. Nekhludoff looked at
her miserable little neck, her thin, unkempt hair, and wondered
why she had been doing all these strange things, and why she was
now telling all this to him. He pitied her, but not as he had
pitied Menshoff, the peasant, kept for no fault of his own in the
stinking prison. She was pitiable because of the confusion that
filled her mind. It was clear that she considered herself a
heroine, and was ready to give her life for a cause, though she
could hardly have explained what that cause was and in what its
success would lie.