“Let me go, you drunken devil,” said Zossimov, struggling and when he had let him go, he stared at him and went off into a sudden guffaw. Razumihin stood facing him in gloomy and earnest reflection.
“Of course, I am an ass,” he observed, sombre as a storm cloud, “but still … you are another.”
“No, brother, not at all such another. I am not dreaming of any folly.”
They walked along in silence and only when they were close to Raskolnikov’s lodgings, Razumihin broke the silence in considerable anxiety.
“Listen,” he said, “you’re a first-rate fellow, but among your other failings, you’re a loose fish, that I know, and a dirty one, too. You are a feeble, nervous wretch, and a mass of whims, you’re getting fat and lazy and can’t deny yourself anything—and I call that dirty because it leads one straight into the dirt. You’ve let yourself get so slack that I don’t know how it is you are still a good, even a devoted doctor. You—a doctor—sleep on a feather bed and get up at night to your patients! In another three or four years you won’t get up for your patients … But hang it all, that’s not the point! … You are going to spend tonight in the landlady’s flat here. (Hard work I’ve had to persuade her!) And I’ll be in the kitchen. So here’s a chance for you to get to know her better. … It’s not as you think! There’s not a trace of anything of the sort, brother … !”
“But I don’t think!”
“Here you have modesty, brother, silence, bashfulness, a savage virtue … and yet she’s sighing and melting like wax, simply melting! Save me from her, by all that’s unholy! She’s most prepossessing … I’ll repay you, I’ll do anything. …”