“Then you don’t mean to take proceedings?”
“Ivan has dissuaded me. I shouldn’t care about Ivan, but there’s another thing.”
And bending down to Alyosha, he went on in a confidential half‐whisper.
“If I send the ruffian to prison, she’ll hear of it and run to see him at once. But if she hears that he has beaten me, a weak old man, within an inch of my life, she may give him up and come to me.... For that’s her way, everything by contraries. I know her through and through! Won’t you have a drop of brandy? Take some cold coffee and I’ll pour a quarter of a glass of brandy into it, it’s delicious, my boy.”
“No, thank you. I’ll take that roll with me if I may,” said Alyosha, and taking a halfpenny French roll he put it in the pocket of his cassock. “And you’d better not have brandy, either,” he suggested apprehensively, looking into the old man’s face.
“You are quite right, it irritates my nerves instead of soothing them. Only one little glass. I’ll get it out of the cupboard.”
He unlocked the cupboard, poured out a glass, drank it, then locked the cupboard and put the key back in his pocket.
“That’s enough. One glass won’t kill me.”
“You see you are in a better humor now,” said Alyosha, smiling.
“Um! I love you even without the brandy, but with scoundrels I am a scoundrel. Ivan is not going to Tchermashnya—why is that? He wants to spy how much I give Grushenka if she comes. They are all scoundrels! But I don’t recognize Ivan, I don’t know him at all. Where does he come from? He is not one of us in soul. As though I’d leave him anything! I shan’t leave a will at all, you may as well know. And I’ll crush Mitya like a beetle. I squash black‐beetles at night with my slipper; they squelch when you tread on them. And your Mitya will squelch too. Your Mitya, for you love him. Yes, you love him and I am not afraid of your loving him. But if Ivan loved him I should be afraid for myself at his loving him. But Ivan loves nobody. Ivan is not one of us. People like Ivan are not our sort, my boy. They are like a cloud of dust. When the wind blows, the dust will be gone.... I had a silly idea in my head when I told you to come to‐day; I wanted to find out from you about Mitya. If I were to hand him over a thousand or maybe two now, would the beggarly wretch agree to take himself off altogether for five years or, better still, thirty‐five, and without Grushenka, and give her up once for all, eh?”