him just as he is; you love him for insulting you. If he reformed, you’d give him up at once and cease to love him. But you need him so as to contemplate continually your heroic fidelity and to reproach him for infidelity. And it all comes from your pride. Oh, there’s a great deal of humiliation and self-abasement about it, but it all comes from pride. … I am too young and I’ve loved you too much. I know that I ought not to say this, that it would be more dignified on my part simply to leave you, and it would be less offensive for you. But I am going far away, and shall never come back. … It is forever. I don’t want to sit beside a ‘laceration.’ … But I don’t know how to speak now. I’ve said everything. … Goodbye, Katerina Ivanovna; you can’t be angry with me, for I am a hundred times more severely punished than you, if only by the fact that I shall never see you again. Goodbye! I don’t want your hand. You have tortured me too deliberately for me to be able to forgive you at this moment. I shall forgive you later, but now I don’t want your hand. ‘ Den Dank, Dame, begehr ich nicht ,’ ” he added, with a forced smile, showing, however, that he could read Schiller, and read him till he knew him by heart—which Alyosha would never have believed. He went out of the room without saying goodbye even to his hostess, Madame Hohlakov. Alyosha clasped his hands.
“Ivan!” he cried desperately after him. “Come back, Ivan! No, nothing will induce him to come back now!” he cried again, regretfully realizing it; “but it’s my fault, my fault. I began it! Ivan