n of these subtleties and distinctions, and, if you will be
so kind, get back to the point. And the point is, that you have still not
told us, altogether 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 forehead; "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 pestering Agrafena Alexandrovna, 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 suddenly 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 thousand, 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 Parfenovitch, "for after all what
does it amount to?"

"Why, that I stole it, that's what it amounts to! Oh, God, you horrify me
by not understanding! Every day that I had that fifteen hundred sewn up
round my neck, every day and every hour I said to myself, 'You're a thief!
you're a thief!' Yes, that's why I've been so savage all this month,
that's why I fought in the tavern, that's why I attacked my father, it was
because I felt I was a thief. I couldn't make up my mind, I didn't dare
even to tell Alyosha, my brother, about that fifteen hundred: I felt I was
such a scoundrel and such a pickpocket. But, do you know, while I carried
it I said to myself at the same time every hour: 'No, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,
you may yet not be a thief.' Why? Because I might go next day and pay back
that fifteen hundred to Katya. And only