“You take evil for good; it’s a passing crisis, it’s the result of your illness, perhaps.”
“You do despise me, though! It’s simply that I don’t want to do good, I want to do evil, and it has nothing to do with illness.”
“Why do evil?”
“So that everything might be destroyed. Ah, how nice it would be if everything were destroyed! You know, Alyosha, I sometimes think of doing a fearful lot of harm and everything bad, and I should do it for a long while on the sly and suddenly everyone would find it out. Everyone will stand round and point their fingers at me and I would look at them all. That would be awfully nice. Why would it be so nice, Alyosha?”
“I don’t know. It’s a craving to destroy something good or, as you say, to set fire to something. It happens sometimes.”
“I not only say it, I shall do it.”
“I believe you.”
“Ah, how I love you for saying you believe me. And you are not lying one little bit. But perhaps you think that I am saying all this on purpose to annoy you?”
“No, I don’t think that … though perhaps there is a little desire to do that in it, too.”
“There is a little. I never can tell lies to you,” she declared, with a strange fire in her eyes.
What struck Alyosha above everything was her earnestness. There was not a trace of humor or jesting in her face now, though, in old days, fun and gayety never deserted her even at her most “earnest” moments.