Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com Dmitri was struck dumb.
‘Impossible!’ he cried. ‘You’re raving! Grushenka with
her?’
Alyosha described all that had happened from the mo-
ment he went in to Katerina Ivanovna’s. He was ten minutes
telling his story. can’t be said to have told it fluently and
consecutively, but he seemed to make it clear, not omitting
any word or action of significance, and vividly describing,
often in one word, his own sensations. Dmitri listened in
silence, gazing at him with a terrible fixed stare, but it was
clear to Alyosha that he understood it all, and had grasped
every point. But as the story went on, his face became not
merely gloomy, but menacing. He scowled, he clenched his
teeth, and his fixed stare became still more rigid, more con-
centrated, more terrible, when suddenly, with incredible
rapidity, his wrathful, savage face changed, his tightly com-
pressed lips parted, and Dmitri Fyodorovitch broke into
uncontrolled, spontaneous laughter. He literally shook with
laughter. For a long time he could not speak.
‘So she wouldn’t kiss her hand! So she didn’t kiss it; so
she ran away!’ he kept exclaiming with hysterical delight;
insolent delight it might had been called, if it had not been
so spontaneous. ‘So the other one called her tigress! And a
tigress she is! So she ought to be flogged on a scaffold? Yes,
yes, so she ought. That’s just what I think; she ought to have
been long ago. It’s like this, brother, let her be punished, but
I must get better first. I understand the queen of impudence.
That’s her all over! You saw her all over in that hand-kissing,
the she-devil! She’s magnificent in her own line! So she ran