10 The Brothers Karamazov
ago that there’s no harm in forgetting it. Now I only prize
the reputation of being a gentlemanly person and live as
I can, trying to make myself agreeable. I love men genu-
inely, I’ve been greatly calumniated! Here when I stay with
you from time to time, my life gains a kind of reality and
that’s what I like most of all. You see, like you, I suffer from
the fantastic and so I love the realism of earth. Here, with
you, everything is circumscribed, here all is formulated
and geometrical, while we have nothing but indeterminate
equations! I wander about here dreaming. I like dreaming.
Besides, on earth I become superstitious. Please don’t laugh,
that’s just what I like, to become superstitious. I adopt
all your habits here: I’ve grown fond of going to the pub-
lic baths, would you believe it? and I go and steam myself
with merchants and priests. What I dream of is becoming
incarnate once for all and irrevocably in the form of some
merchant’s wife weighing eighteen stone, and of believing
all she believes. My ideal is to go to church and offer a can-
dle in simple-hearted faith, upon my word it is. Then there
would be an end to my sufferings. I like being doctored too;
in the spring there was an outbreak of smallpox and I went
and was vaccinated in a foundling hospital — if only you
knew how I enjoyed myself that day. I subscribed ten rou-
bles in the cause of the Slavs!... But you are not listening.
Do you know, you are not at all well this evening? I know
you went yesterday to that doctor... well, what about your
health? What did the doctor say?’
‘Fool!’ Ivan snapped out.
‘But you are clever, anyway. You are scolding again? I