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surname!). Or — the old man was laughing at him.
Alas! The second alternative was the correct one. Long
afterwards, when the catastrophe had happened, old Sam-
sonov himself confessed, laughing, that he had made a
fool of the ‘captain.’ He was a cold, spiteful and sarcastic
man, liable to violent antipathies. Whether it was the ‘cap-
tain’s’ excited face, or the foolish conviction of the ‘rake
and spendthrift,’ that he, Samsonov, could be taken in by
such a cock-and-bull story as his scheme, or his jealousy of
Grushenka, in whose name this ‘scapegrace’ had rushed in
on him with such a tale to get money which worked on the
old man, I can’t tell. But at the instant when Mitya stood
before him, feeling his legs grow weak under him, and fran-
tically exclaiming that he was ruined, at that moment the
old man looked at him with intense spite, and resolved to
make a laughing-stock of him. When Mitya had gone, Kuz-
ma Kuzmitch, white with rage, turned to his son and bade
him see to it that that beggar be never seen again, and never
admitted even into the yard, or else he’d-
He did not utter his threat. But even his son, who of-
ten saw him enraged, trembled with fear. For a whole hour
afterwards, the old man was shaking with anger, and by
evening he was worse, and sent for the doctor.