up my mind to give it back tomorrow, and I’m a scoundrel no longer, but I cannot make up my mind, you see, though I’m making up my mind every day, and every day spurring myself on to do it, and yet for a whole month I can’t bring myself to it, you see. Is that right to your thinking, is that right?”
“Certainly, that’s not right, that I can quite understand, and that I don’t dispute,” answered the prosecutor with reserve.
“And let us give up all discussion of these subtleties and distinctions, and, if you will be so kind, get back to the point. And the point is, that you have still not told us, altogether we’ve asked you, why, in the first place, you halved the money, squandering one half and hiding the other? For what purpose exactly did you hide it, what did you mean to do with that fifteen hundred? I insist upon that question, Dmitri Fyodorovitch.”
“Yes, of course!” cried Mitya, striking himself on the forehead; “forgive me, I’m worrying you, and am not explaining the chief point, or you’d understand in a minute, for it’s just the motive of it that’s the disgrace! You see, it was all to do with the old man, my dead father. He was always pestering Agrafena Alexandrovna, and I was jealous; I thought then that she was hesitating between me and him. So I kept thinking every day, suppose she were to make up her mind all of a sudden, suppose she were to leave off tormenting me, and were suddenly to say to me, ‘I love you, not him; take me to the other end of the world.’ And I’d only forty copecks; how could I take