It can't be!"
"Very recently.
His sister spent all winter gnawing a path for him, working like a rat."
"I don't believe it," the prince repeated firmly after some reflection and agitation.
"If it was so, I would certainly have known."
"No fear he'd come himself and confess it in tears on your breast!
Ah, you simpleton, simpleton!
Everybody deceives you like . . . like . . . Aren't you ashamed to trust him?
Do you really not see that he's duped you all around?"
"I know very well that he occasionally deceives me," the prince said reluctantly in a low voice, "and he knows that I know it . . ." he added and did not finish.
"To know and to trust him!
Just what you need!
However, with you that's as it should be.
And what am I surprised at? Lord!
Has there ever been another man like this?
Pah!
And do you know that this Ganka or this Varka has put her in touch with Nastasya Filippovna?"
"Whom?!" exclaimed the prince.
"Aglaya."
"I don't believe it!
It can't be!
With what purpose?"
He jumped up from the chair.
"I don't believe it either, though there's evidence.
She's a willful girl, a fantastic girl, a crazy girl!
A wicked, wicked, wicked girl!
For a thousand years I'll go on insisting that she's wicked!
They're all that way now, even that wet hen Alexandra, but this one has already gotten completely out of hand.
But I also don't believe it!
Maybe because I don't want to believe it," she added as if to herself.
"Why didn't you come?" she suddenly turned to the prince again.
"Why didn't you come for all these three days?" she impatiently cried to him a second time.
The prince was beginning to give his reasons, but she interrupted him again.
"Everyone considers you a fool and deceives you!
You went to town yesterday; I'll bet you got on your knees and begged that scoundrel to accept the ten thousand!"
"Not at all, I never thought of it.
I didn't even see him, and, besides, he's not a scoundrel.
I received a letter from him."
"Show me the letter!"
The prince took a note from his briefcase and handed it to Lizaveta Prokofyevna.
The note read:
My dear sir, I, of course, do not have the least right in people's eyes to have any self-love.
In people's opinion, I am too insignificant for that.
But that is in people's eyes, not in yours.
I am only too convinced that you, my dear sir, are perhaps better than the others.
I disagree with Doktorenko and part ways with him in this conviction.
I will never take a single kopeck from you, but you have helped my mother, and for that I owe you gratitude, even though it comes from weakness.
In any case, I look upon you differently and consider it necessary to let you know.
And with that I assume there can be no further contacts between us.
Antip Burdovsky.