turn to that subject later," said the lawyer promptly. "You
will allow us to note that point and write it down; that you looked upon
that money as your own property?"

"Write it down, by all means. I know that's another fact that tells
against me, but I'm not afraid of facts and I tell them against myself. Do
you hear? Do you know, gentlemen, you take me for a different sort of man
from what I am," he added, suddenly gloomy and dejected. "You have to deal
with a man of honor, a man of the highest honor; above all--don't lose
sight of it--a man who's done a lot of nasty things, but has always been,
and still is, honorable at bottom, in his inner being. I don't know how to
express it. That's just what's made me wretched all my life, that I
yearned to be honorable, that I was, so to say, a martyr to a sense of
honor, seeking for it with a lantern, with the lantern of Diogenes, and
yet all my life I've been doing filthy things like all of us, gentlemen
... that is like me alone. That was a mistake, like me alone, me alone!...
Gentlemen, my head aches ..." His brows contracted with pain. "You see,
gentlemen, I couldn't bear the look of him, there was something in him
ignoble, impudent, trampling on everything sacred, something sneering and
irreverent, loathsome, loathsome. But now that he's dead, I feel
differently."

"How do you mean?"

"I don't feel differently, but I wish I hadn't hated him so."

"You feel penitent?"

"No, not penitent, don't write that. I'm not much good myself, I'm not
very beautiful, so I had no right to consider him repulsive. That's what I
mean. Write that down, if you like."

Saying this Mitya became very mournful. He had grown more and more gloomy
as the inquiry continued.

At that moment another unexpected scene followed. Though Grushenka had
been removed, she had not been taken far away, only into the room next but
one from the blue room, in which the examination was proceeding. It was a
little room with one window, next beyond the large room in which they had
danced and feasted so lavishly. She was sitting there with no one by her
but Maximov, who was terribly depressed, terribly scared, and clung to her
side, as though for security. At their door stood one of the peasants with
a metal plate on his breast. Grushenka was crying, and suddenly her grief
was too much for her, she jumped up, flung up her arms and, with a loud
wail of sorrow, rushed out of the room to him, to her Mitya, and so