The Brothers Karamazov
was not in the least abashed as he stood before the lawyers.
He had, on the contrary, an air of stern and severe indig-
nation with the accused, which gave him an appearance
of truthfulness and personal dignity. He spoke little, and
with reserve, waited to be questioned, answered precisely
and deliberately. Firmly and unhesitatingly he bore wit-
ness that the sum spent a month before could not have been
less than three thousand, that all the peasants about here
would testify that they had heard the sum of three thousand
mentioned by Dmitri Fyodorovitch himself. ‘What a lot of
money he flung away on the Gypsy girls alone! He wasted a
thousand, I daresay, on them alone.’
‘I don’t believe I gave them five hundred,’ was Mitya’s
gloomy comment on this. ‘It’s a pity I didn’t count the mon-
ey at the time, but I was drunk..’
Mitya was sitting sideways with his back to the curtains.
He listened gloomily, with a melancholy and exhausted air,
as though he would say:
‘Oh, say what you like. It makes no difference now.’
‘More than a thousand went on them, Dmitri Fyodo-
rovitch,’ retorted Trifon Borissovitch firmly. ‘You flung it
about at random and they picked it up. They were a rascally,
thievish lot, horse-stealers, they’ve been driven away from
here, or maybe they’d bear witness themselves how much
they got from you. I saw the sum in your hands, myself —
count it I didn’t, you didn’t let me, that’s true enough- but
by the look of it I should say it was far more than fifteen
hundred... fifteen hundred, indeed! We’ve seen money too.
We can judge of amounts..’