see you are interested in contemporary questions, but how can I have excited your curiosity, living as I do in surroundings impossible for the exercise of hospitality?”
“I’ve come—about that business.”
“About what business?” the captain interrupted impatiently.
“About your meeting with my brother Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” Alyosha blurted out awkwardly.
“What meeting, sir? You don’t mean that meeting? About my ‘wisp of tow,’ then?”
He moved closer so that his knees positively knocked against Alyosha. His lips were strangely compressed like a thread.
“What wisp of tow?” muttered Alyosha.
“He is come to complain of me, father!” cried a voice familiar to Alyosha—the voice of the schoolboy—from behind the curtain. “I bit his finger just now.” The curtain was pulled, and Alyosha saw his assailant lying on a little bed made up on the bench and the chair in the corner under the icons. The boy lay covered by his