I am sure that he had a real affection for me, and that struck me very much. Whether he considered me undeveloped, not fully a man, or felt for me that special sort of compassion that every strong creature instinctively feels for someone, weaker, recognizing me as such⁠—I don’t know. And although all that did not prevent him from robbing me, I am sure he felt sorry for me as he did it. “Ech!” he may have thought as he laid hands on my property, “what a man, he can’t even defend his own property.” But I fancy that was what he liked me for. He said to me himself one day, as it were casually, that I was “a man with too good a heart” and “so simple, so simple, that it makes one feel sorry for you. Only don’t take it amiss, Alexandr Petrovitch,” he added a minute later, “I spoke without thinking, from my heart.”