0 The Brothers Karamazov
all?’ Ivan went on, turning white with anger. ‘You say that
yourself, and all the while I’ve been here, I’ve felt sure it was
all the old man’s fancy, and the creature won’t come to him.
Why should Dmitri break in on him if she doesn’t come?
Speak, I want to know what you are thinking!’
‘You know yourself why he’ll come. What’s the use of
what I think? His honour will come simply because he is
in a rage or suspicious on account of my illness perhaps,
and he’ll dash in, as he did yesterday through impatience
to search the rooms, to see whether she hasn’t escaped him
on the sly. He is perfectly well aware, too, that Fyodor Pav-
lovitch has a big envelope with three thousand roubles in
it, tied up with ribbon and sealed with three seals. On it
is written in his own hand ‘To my angel Grushenka, if she
will come,’ to which he added three days later, ‘for my little
chicken.’ There’s no knowing what that might do.’
‘Nonsense!’ cried Ivan, almost beside himself. ‘Dmitri
won’t come to steal money and kill my father to do it. He
might have killed him yesterday on account of Grushenka,
like the frantic, savage fool he is, but he won’t steal.’
‘He is in very great need of money now — the greatest
need, Ivan Fyodorovitch. You don’t know in what need he
is,’ Smerdyakov explained, with perfect composure and re-
markable distinctness. ‘He looks on that three thousand as
his own, too. He said so to me himself. ‘My father still owes
me just three thousand,’ he said. And besides that, consider,
Ivan Fyodorovitch, there is something else perfectly true.
It’s as good as certain, so to say, that Agrafena Alexandrov-
na will force him, if only she cares to, to marry her — the