certainly was sitting by a ‘laceration.’ Ah, she knew how I loved her! She loved me and not Dmitri,” Ivan insisted gayly. “Her feeling for Dmitri was simply a self-laceration. All I told her just now was perfectly true, but the worst of it is, it may take her fifteen or twenty years to find out that she doesn’t care for Dmitri, and loves me whom she torments, and perhaps she may never find it out at all, in spite of her lesson today. Well, it’s better so; I can simply go away for good. By the way, how is she now? What happened after I departed?”
Alyosha told him she had been hysterical, and that she was now, he heard, unconscious and delirious.
“Isn’t Madame Hohlakov laying it on?”
“I think not.”
“I must find out. Nobody dies of hysterics, though. They don’t matter. God gave woman hysterics as a relief.