Sonia was silent.

“And if you’d gone to prison, what then? Do you remember what I said yesterday?”

Again she did not answer. He waited.

“I thought you would cry out again ‘don’t speak of it, leave off.’” Raskolnikov gave a laugh, but rather a forced one. “What, silence again?” he asked a minute later. “We must talk about something, you know. It would be interesting for me to know how you would decide a certain ‘problem’ as Lebeziatnikov would say.” (He was beginning to lose the thread.) “No, really, I am serious. Imagine, Sonia, that you had known all Luzhin’s intentions beforehand. Known, that is, for a fact, that they would be the ruin of Katerina Ivanovna and the children and yourself thrown in —