The rough material of the coat rubbed her thin white neck, and sometimes Musya would free her throat with both hands and would cautiously feel the spot where the irritated skin was red and smarted.
Musya paced the cell, and, blushing in agitation, she imagined that she was justifying herself before the people.

She tried to justify herself for the fact that she, who was so young, so insignificant, who had done so little, and who was not at all a heroine, was yet to undergo the same honorable and beautiful death by which real heroes and martyrs had died before her.

With unshakable faith in human kindness, in their compassion, in their love, she pictured to herself how people were now agitated on her account, how they suffered, how they pitied her, and she felt so ashamed that she blushed, as if, by dying upon the scaffold, she had committed some tremendous, awkward blunder.
At the last meeting with their counsel she had asked him to bring her poison, but suddenly she had changed her mind.

What if he and the others, she thought, should consider that she was doing it merely to become conspicuous, or out of cowardice, that instead of dying modestly and unnoticed, she was attempting to glorify herself.

And she added hastily: "No, it isn't necessary." And now she desired but one thing--to be able to explain to people, to prove to them so that they should have not the slightest doubt that she was not at all a heroine, that it was not terrible to die, that they should not feel sorry for her, nor trouble themselves about her.