Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 1he, with nothing in the world, to raise such a sum? — yet
to the very end he persisted in hoping that he would get
that three thousand, that the money would somehow come
to him of itself, as though it might drop from heaven. That
is just how it is with people who, like Dmitri, have never
had anything to do with money, except to squander what
has come to them by inheritance without any effort of their
own, and have no notion how money is obtained. A whirl of
the most fantastic notions took possession of his brain im-
mediately after he had parted with Alyosha two days before,
and threw his thoughts into a tangle of confusion. This is
how it was he pitched first on a perfectly wild enterprise.
And perhaps to men of that kind in such circumstances the
most impossible, fantastic schemes occur first, and seem
most practical.
He suddenly determined to go to Samsonov, the mer-
chant who was Grushenka’s protector, and to propose a
‘scheme’ to him, and by means of it to obtain from him at
once the whole of the sum required. Of the commercial val-
ue of his scheme he had no doubt, not the slightest, and was
only uncertain how Samsonov would look upon his freak,
supposing he were to consider it from any but the com-
mercial point of view. Though Mitya knew the merchant by
sight, he was not acquainted with him and had never spo-
ken a word to him. But for some unknown reason he had
long entertained the conviction that the old reprobate, who
was lying at death’s door, would perhaps not at all object
now to Grushenka’s securing a respectable position, and
marrying a man ‘to be depended upon.’ And he believed