.
I give it for what it's worth. So that's the sort of ideas we have on such
subjects even now."

"I've caught you!" Ivan cried, with an almost childish delight, as though
he had succeeded in remembering something at last. "That anecdote about
the quadrillion years, I made up myself! I was seventeen then, I was at
the high school. I made up that anecdote and told it to a schoolfellow
called Korovkin, it was at Moscow.... The anecdote is so characteristic
that I couldn't have taken it from anywhere. I thought I'd forgotten it
... but I've unconsciously recalled it--I recalled it myself--it was not you
telling it! Thousands of things are unconsciously remembered like that
even when people are being taken to execution ... it's come back to me in
a dream. You are that dream! You are a dream, not a living creature!"

"From the vehemence with which you deny my existence," laughed the
gentleman, "I am convinced that you believe in me."

"Not in the slightest! I haven't a hundredth part of a grain of faith in
you!"

"But you have the thousandth of a grain. Homeopathic doses perhaps are the
strongest. Confess that you have faith even to the ten-thousandth of a
grain."

"Not for one minute," cried Ivan furiously. "But I should like to believe
in you," he added strangely.

"Aha! There's an admission! But I am good-natured. I'll come to your
assistance again. Listen, it was I caught you, not you me. I told you your
anecdote you'd forgotten, on purpose, so as to destroy your faith in me
completely."

"You are lying. The object of your visit is to convince me of your
existence!"

"Just so. But hesitation, suspense, conflict between belief and
disbelief--is sometimes such torture to a conscientious man, such as you
are, that it's better to hang oneself at once. Knowing that you are
inclined to believe in me, I administered some disbelief by telling you
that anecdote. I lead you to belief and disbelief by turns, and I have my
motive in it. It's the new method. As soon as you disbelieve in me
completely, you'll begin assuring me to my face that I am not a dream but
a reality. I know you. Then I shall have attained my object, which is an
honorable one. I shall sow in you only a tiny grain of faith and it will
grow into an oak-tree--and such an oak-tree that, sitting on it, you will
long to enter the ranks of 'the hermits in the wilderness and the saintly
women,' for that is what you are secretly longing for. You'll dine on
loc