if not, you will kill yourself, you can't endure it!"

"There is a strength to endure everything," Ivan said with a cold smile.

"What strength?"

"The strength of the Karamazovs--the strength of the Karamazov baseness."

"To sink into debauchery, to stifle your soul with corruption, yes?"

"Possibly even that ... only perhaps till I am thirty I shall escape it,
and then--"

"How will you escape it? By what will you escape it? That's impossible
with your ideas."

"In the Karamazov way, again."

" 'Everything is lawful,' you mean? Everything is lawful, is that it?"

Ivan scowled, and all at once turned strangely pale.

"Ah, you've caught up yesterday's phrase, which so offended Miuesov--and
which Dmitri pounced upon so naively, and paraphrased!" he smiled queerly.
"Yes, if you like, 'everything is lawful' since the word has been said. I
won't deny it. And Mitya's version isn't bad."

Alyosha looked at him in silence.

"I thought that going away from here I have you at least," Ivan said
suddenly, with unexpected feeling; "but now I see that there is no place
for me even in your heart, my dear hermit. The formula, 'all is lawful,' I
won't renounce--will you renounce me for that, yes?"

Alyosha got up, went to him and softly kissed him on the lips.

"That's plagiarism," cried Ivan, highly delighted. "You stole that from my
poem. Thank you though. Get up, Alyosha, it's time we were going, both of
us."

They went out, but stopped when they reached the entrance of the
restaurant.

"Listen, Alyosha," Ivan began in a resolute voice, "if I am really able to
care for the sticky little leaves I shall only love them, remembering you.
It's enough for me that you are somewhere here, and I shan't lose my
desire for life yet. Is that enough for you? Take it as a declaration of
love if you like. And now you go to the right and I to the left. And it's
enough, do you hear, enough. I mean even if I don't go away to-morrow (I
think I certainly shall go) and we meet again, don't say a word more on
these subjects. I beg that particularly. And about Dmitri too, I ask you
specially, never speak to me again," he added, with sudden irritation;
"it's all exhausted, it has all been said over and over again, hasn't it?
And I'll make you one promise in return for it. When at thirty, I want to
'dash the cup to the ground,' wherever I may be I'll come to have one more
talk with you, even though it were from America, you may be sure of