“As for that door and Grigory Vassilyevitch’s having seen it open, that’s only his fancy,” said Smerdyakov, with a wry smile. “He is not a man, I assure you, but an obstinate mule. He didn’t see it, but fancied he had seen it, and there’s no shaking him. It’s just our luck he took that notion into his head, for they can’t fail to convict Dmitri Fyodorovitch after that.”
“Listen …” said Ivan, beginning to seem bewildered again and making an effort to grasp something. “Listen. There are a lot of questions I want to ask you, but I forget them … I keep forgetting and getting mixed up. Yes. Tell me this at least, why did you open the envelope and leave it there on the floor? Why didn’t you simply carry off the envelope? … When you were telling me, I thought you spoke about it as though it were the right thing to do … but why, I can’t understand. …”
“I did that for a good reason. For if a man had known all about it, as I did for instance, if he’d seen those notes before, and perhaps had put them in that envelope himself, and had seen the envelope sealed up and addressed, with his own eyes, if such a man had done the murder, what should have made him tear open the envelope afterwards, especially in such