notes from underground

He was so calm that she too controlled herself. Oh, there were many things, very many, that she would have liked to say, things she would have liked to thank him for, or hold up to him. But she saw that he was right. It was plain that to him everything that she still felt to be life and bitterly present had already become shadowy past. There was nothing else to do but be calm and let the past be past. And so she listened patiently and attentively to his instructions, surprised at how thoroughly he had thought it all out.