0 The Brothers Karamazov
that broke so suddenly upon him.
Though Grushenka had, it is true, loved him for an hour,
genuinely and sincerely, yet she tortured him sometimes
cruelly and mercilessly. The worst of it was that he could
never tell what she meant to do. To prevail upon her by force
or kindness was also impossible: she would yield to noth-
ing. She would only have become angry and turned away
from him altogether, he knew that well already. He suspect-
ed, quite correctly, that she, too, was passing through an
inward struggle, and was in a state of extraordinary indeci-
sion, that she was making up her mind to something, and
unable to determine upon it. And so, not without good rea-
son, he divined, with a sinking heart, that at moments she
must simply hate him and his passion. And so, perhaps, it
was, but what was distressing Grushenka he did not under-
stand. For him the whole tormenting question lay between
him and Fyodor Pavlovitch.
Here, we must note, by the way, one certain fact: he was
firmly persuaded that Fyodor Pavlovitch would offer, or
perhaps had offered, Grushenka lawful wedlock, and did
not for a moment believe that the old voluptuary hoped
to gain his object for three thousand roubles. Mitya had
reached this conclusion from his knowledge of Grushenka
and her character. That was how it was that he could be-
lieve at times that all Grushenka’s uneasiness rose from not
knowing which of them to choose, which was most to her
advantage.
Strange to say, during those days it never occurred to
him to think of the approaching return of the ‘officer,’ that