did you hear about me, and my coming here yesterday? From whom did you first hear it?”
And Mitya began telling her all about it, disconnectedly, incoherently, feverishly. He spoke strangely, often frowning, and stopping abruptly.
“What are you frowning at?” she asked.
“Nothing. … I left a man ill there. I’d give ten years of my life for him to get well, to know he was all right!”
“Well, never mind him, if he’s ill. So you meant to shoot yourself tomorrow! What a silly boy! What for? I like such reckless fellows as you,” she lisped, with a rather halting tongue. “So you would go any length for me, eh? Did you really mean to shoot yourself tomorrow, you stupid? No, wait a little. Tomorrow I may have something to say to you. … I won’t say it today, but tomorrow. You’d like it to be today? No, I don’t want to today. Come, go along now, go and amuse yourself.”
Once, however, she called him, as it were, puzzled and uneasy.
“Why are you sad? I see you’re sad. … Yes, I see it,” she added, looking intently into his eyes. “Though you keep kissing the peasants and shouting, I see something. No, be merry. I’m merry; you be merry, too. … I love somebody here. Guess who it is. Ah, look, my boy has fallen asleep, poor dear, he’s drunk.”
She meant Kalganov. He was, in fact, drunk, and had dropped asleep for a moment, sitting on the sofa. But he was not merely drowsy from drink; he felt suddenly dejected, or, as he said, “bored.” He was intensely depressed by the girls’ songs, which, as the