“Look, you haven’t got your nails clean. Now rub your face; here, on your temples, by your ear. … Will you go in that shirt? Where are you going? Look, all the cuff of your right sleeve is covered with blood.”
“Yes, it’s all bloody,” observed Mitya, looking at the cuff of his shirt.
“Then change your shirt.”
“I haven’t time. You see I’ll …” Mitya went on with the same confiding ingenuousness, drying his face and hands on the towel, and putting on his coat. “I’ll turn it up at the wrist. It won’t be seen under the coat. … You see!”
“Tell me now, what game have you been up to? Have you been fighting with someone? In the tavern again, as before? Have you been beating that captain again?” Pyotr Ilyitch asked him reproachfully. “Whom have you been beating now … or killing, perhaps?”
“Nonsense!” said Mitya.
“Why ‘nonsense’?”
“Don’t worry,” said Mitya, and he suddenly laughed. “I smashed an old woman in the marketplace just now.”
“Smashed? An old woman?”
“An old man!” cried Mitya, looking Pyotr Ilyitch straight in the face, laughing, and shouting at him as though he were deaf.