Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 1and distinctions, and, if you will be so kind, get back to the
point. And the point is, that you have still not told us, al-
though we’ve asked you, why, in the first place, you halved
the money, squandering one half and hiding the other? For
what purpose exactly did you hide it, what did you mean
to do with that fifteen hundred? I insist upon that question,
Dmitri Fyodorovitch.’
‘Yes, of course!’ cried Mitya, striking himself on the fore-
head; ‘forgive me, I’m worrying you, and am not explaining
the chief point, or you’d understand in a minute, for it’s just
the motive of it that’s the disgrace! You see, it was all to do
with the old man, my dead father. He was always pester-
ing Agrafena and I was jealous; I thought then that she was
hesitating between me and him. So I kept thinking every-
day, suppose she were to make up her mind all of a sudden,
suppose she were to leave off tormenting me, and were sud-
denly to say to me, ‘I love you, not him; take me to the other
end of the world.’ And I’d only forty copecks; how could I
take her away, what could I do? Why, I’d be lost. You see, I
didn’t know her then, I didn’t understand her, I thought she
wanted money, and that she wouldn’t forgive my poverty.
And so I fiendishly counted out the half of that three thou-
sand, sewed it up, calculating on it, sewed it up before I was
drunk, and after I had sewn it up, I went off to get drunk on
the rest. Yes, that was base. Do you understand now?’
Both the lawyers laughed aloud.
‘I should have called it sensible and moral on your part
not to have squandered it all,’ chuckled Nikolay Parfeno-
vitch, ‘for after all what does it amount to?’