Everything you want that's possible shall be got for you.
You shall pray, go where you like, and do what you like.
I won't touch you.
I won't go away from the place myself at all.
If you like, I won't speak to you all my life, or if you like, you can tell me your stories every evening as you used to do in Petersburg in the corners.
I'll read aloud to you if you like.
But it must be all your life in the same place, and that place is a gloomy one.
Will you? Are you ready?
You won't regret it, torment me with tears and curses, will you?"
She listened with extreme curiosity, and for a long time she was silent, thinking.
"It all seems incredible to me," she said at last, ironically and disdainfully.
"I might live for forty years in those mountains," she laughed.
"What of it?
Let's live forty years then..." said Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch, scowling.
"H'm! I won't come for anything."
"Not even with me?"
"And what are you that I should go with you?
I'm to sit on a mountain beside him for forty years on end—a pretty story!
And upon my word, how long-suffering people have become nowadays!
No, it cannot be that a falcon has become an owl.
My prince is not like that!" she said, raising her head proudly and triumphantly.
Light seemed to dawn upon him.
"What makes you call me a prince, and... for whom do you take me?" he asked quickly.
"Why, aren't you the prince?"
"I never have been one."
"So yourself, yourself, you tell me straight to my face that you're not the prince?"
"I tell you I never have been."
"Good Lord!" she cried, clasping her hands. "I was ready to expect anything from his enemies, but such insolence, never!
Is he alive?" she shrieked in a frenzy, turning upon Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch.
"Have you killed him? Confess!"
"Whom do you take me for?" he cried, jumping up from his chair with a distorted face; but it was not easy now to frighten her. She was triumphant.
"Who can tell who you are and where you've sprung from?
Only my heart, my heart had misgivings all these five years, of all the intrigues.
And I've been sitting here wondering what blind owl was making up to me?
No, my dear, you're a poor actor, worse than Lebyadkin even.
Give my humble greetings to the countess and tell her to send someone better than you.
Has she hired you, tell me?
Have they given you a place in her kitchen out of charity?
I see through your deception. I understand you all, every one of you."
He seized her firmly above the elbow; she laughed in his face.
"You're like him, very like, perhaps you're a relation—you're a sly lot!
Only mine is a bright falcon and a prince, and you're an owl, and a shopman!
Mine will bow down to God if it pleases him, and won't if it doesn't. And Shatushka (he's my dear, my darling!) slapped you on the cheeks, my Lebyadkin told me.
And what were you afraid of then, when you came in?
Who had frightened you then?
When I saw your mean face after I'd fallen down and you picked me up—it was like a worm crawling into my heart. It's not he, I thought, not he!
My falcon would never have been ashamed of me before a fashionable young lady.
Oh heavens! That alone kept me happy for those five years that my falcon was living somewhere beyond the mountains, soaring, gazing at the sun.... Tell me, you impostor, have you got much by it?
Did you need a big bribe to consent?
I wouldn't have given you a farthing.