“Me? Can that be?” she faltered, turning pale.
“It can and ought to be!” Alyosha began emphatically, growing more animated.
“He needs you particularly just now. I would not have opened the subject and worried you, if it were not necessary. He is ill, he is beside himself, he keeps asking for you. It is not to be reconciled with you that he wants you, but only that you would go and show yourself at his door. So much has happened to him since that day. He realizes that he has injured you beyond all reckoning. He does not ask your forgiveness—‘It’s impossible to forgive me,’ he says himself—but only that you would show yourself in his doorway.”
“It’s so sudden. …” faltered Katya. “I’ve had a presentiment all these days that you would come with that message. I knew he would ask me to come. It’s impossible!”
“Let it be impossible, but do it. Only think, he realizes for the first time how he has wounded you, the first time in his life; he had never grasped it before so fully. He said, ‘If she refuses to come I shall be unhappy all my life.’ Do you hear? though he is condemned to penal servitude for twenty years, he is still planning to be happy—is not that piteous? Think—you must visit him; though he is ruined, he is innocent,” broke like a challenge from Alyosha. “His hands are clean, there is no blood on them! For the sake of his infinite sufferings in the future visit him now. Go, greet him on his way into the darkness—stand at his door, that is all. … You ought to do it, you ought to!” Alyosha concluded, laying immense stress on the word “ought.”