. The probability is that in the first case he was genuinely noble,
and in the second as genuinely base. And why? Because he was of the broad
Karamazov character--that's just what I am leading up to--capable of
combining the most incongruous contradictions, and capable of the greatest
heights and of the greatest depths. Remember the brilliant remark made by
a young observer who has seen the Karamazov family at close quarters--Mr.
Rakitin: 'The sense of their own degradation is as essential to those
reckless, unbridled natures as the sense of their lofty generosity.' And
that's true, they need continually this unnatural mixture. Two extremes at
the same moment, or they are miserable and dissatisfied and their
existence is incomplete. They are wide, wide as mother Russia; they
include everything and put up with everything.

"By the way, gentlemen of the jury, we've just touched upon that three
thousand roubles, and I will venture to anticipate things a little. Can
you conceive that a man like that, on receiving that sum and in such a
way, at the price of such shame, such disgrace, such utter degradation,
could have been capable that very day of setting apart half that sum, that
very day, and sewing it up in a little bag, and would have had the
firmness of character to carry it about with him for a whole month
afterwards, in spite of every temptation and his extreme need of it!
Neither in drunken debauchery in taverns, nor when he was flying into the
country, trying to get from God knows whom, the money so essential to him
to remove the object of his affections from being tempted by his father,
did he bring himself to touch that little bag! Why, if only to avoid
abandoning his mistress to the rival of whom he was so jealous, he would
have been certain to have opened that bag and to have stayed at home to
keep watch over her, and to await the moment when she would say to him at
last 'I am yours,' and to fly with her far from their fatal surroundings.

"But no, he did not touch his talisman, and what is the reason he gives
for it? The chief reason, as I have just said, was that when she would
say, 'I am yours, take me where you will,' he might have the wherewithal
to take her. But that first reason, in the prisoner's own words, was of
little weight beside the second. While I have that money on me, he said, I
am a scoundrel, not a thief, for I can always go to my insulted betrothed,
and, laying down half the sum I have fraudul