that creature? And they won’t let her go to him, so he is bound to escape. It’s you he’s most afraid of, he is afraid you won’t approve of his escape on moral grounds. But you must generously allow it, if your sanction is so necessary,” Katya added viciously. She paused and smiled.
“He talks about some hymn,” she went on again, “some cross he has to bear, some duty; I remember Ivan Fyodorovitch told me a great deal about it, and if you knew how he talked!”
Katya cried suddenly, with feeling she could not repress, “if you knew how he loved that wretched man at the moment he told me, and how he hated him, perhaps, at the same moment. And I heard his story and his tears with sneering disdain. Brute! Yes, I am a brute. I am responsible for his fever.
But that man in prison is incapable of suffering,” Katya concluded irritably. “Can such a man suffer? Men like him never suffer!”
There was a note of hatred and contemptuous repulsion in her words. And yet it was she who had betrayed him.
“Perhaps because she feels how she’s wronged him she hates him at moments,” Alyosha thought to himself.
He hoped that it was only “at moments.” In Katya’s last words he detected a challenging note, but he did not take it up.
“I sent for you this morning to make you promise to persuade him yourself. Or do you, too, consider that to escape would be dishonorable, cowardly, or something … unchristian, perhaps?” Katya added, even more defiantly.
“Oh, no. I’ll tell him everything,” muttered Alyosha. “He asks you to come and see him today,” he blurted out suddenly, looking her steadily in the face. She started, and drew back a little from him on the sofa.