11 The Brothers Karamazovyou how the real Dmitri Karamazov would have behaved in
such circumstances, if he really had brought himself to put
away the money.
‘At the first temptation — for instance, to entertain the
woman with whom he had already squandered half the
money — he would have unpicked his little bag and have
taken out some hundred roubles, for why should he have
taken back precisely half the money, that is, fifteen hundred
roubles? Why not fourteen hundred? He could just as well
have said then that he was not a thief, because he brought
back fourteen hundred roubles. Then another time he
would have unpicked it again and taken out another hun-
dred, and then a third, and then a fourth, and before the
end of the month he would have taken the last note but one,
feeling that if he took back only a hundred it would answer
the purpose, for a thief would have stolen it all. And then he
would have looked at this last note, and have said to himself,
‘It’s really not worth while to give back one hundred; let’s
spend that, too!’ That’s how the real Dmitri Karamazov, as
we know him, would have behaved. One cannot imagine
anything more incongruous with the actual fact than this
legend of the little bag. Nothing could be more inconceiv-
able. But we shall return to that later.’
After touching upon what had come out in the proceed-
ings concerning the financial relations of father and son,
and arguing again and again that it was utterly impossible,
from the facts known, to determine which was in the wrong,
Ippolit Kirillovitch passed to the evidence of the medical
experts in reference to Mitya’s fixed idea about the three