“Look here, you didn’t say that a fortnight ago.”
“I meant the same when I talked to you in the hospital, only I thought you’d understand without wasting words, and that being such a sensible man you wouldn’t care to talk of it openly.”
“What next! Come answer, answer, I insist: what was it … what could I have done to put such a degrading suspicion into your mean soul?”
“As for the murder, you couldn’t have done that and didn’t want to, but as for wanting someone else to do it, that was just what you did want.”
“And how coolly, how coolly he speaks! But why should I have wanted it; what grounds had I for wanting it?”
“What grounds had you? What about the inheritance?” said Smerdyakov sarcastically, and, as it were, vindictively. “Why, after your parent’s death there was at least forty thousand to come to each of you, and very likely more, but if Fyodor Pavlovitch got married then to that lady, Agrafena Alexandrovna, she would have had all his capital made over to her directly after the wedding, for she’s plenty of sense, so that your parent would not have left you two roubles between the three of you. And were they far from a wedding, either? Not a hair’s-breadth: that lady had only to lift her little finger and he would have run after her to church, with his tongue out.”
Ivan restrained himself with painful effort.
“Very good,” he commented at last. “You see, I haven’t jumped up, I haven’t knocked you down, I haven’t killed you. Speak on. So, according to you, I had fixed on Dmitri to do it; I was reckoning on him?”