“Let me alone,” said Alyosha suddenly, with a weary gesture of his hand, still looking away from him.
“Oho! So that’s how we are feeling! So you can shout at people like other mortals. That is a come‐down from the angels. I say, Alyosha, you have surprised me, do you hear? I mean it. It’s long since I’ve been surprised at anything here. I always took you for an educated man....”
Alyosha at last looked at him, but vaguely, as though scarcely understanding what he said.
“Can you really be so upset simply because your old man has begun to stink? You don’t mean to say you seriously believed that he was going to work miracles?” exclaimed Rakitin, genuinely surprised again.
“I believed, I believe, I want to believe, and I will believe, what more do you want?” cried Alyosha irritably.
“Nothing at all, my boy. Damn it all! why, no schoolboy of thirteen believes in that now. But there.... So now you are in a temper with your God, you are rebelling against Him; He hasn’t given promotion, He hasn’t bestowed the order of merit! Eh, you are a set!”
Alyosha gazed a long while with his eyes half closed at Rakitin, and there was a sudden gleam in his eyes ... but not of anger with Rakitin.
“I am not rebelling against my God; I simply ‘don’t accept His world.’ ” Alyosha suddenly smiled a forced smile.
“How do you mean, you don’t accept the world?” Rakitin thought a moment over his answer. “What idiocy is this?”
Alyosha did not answer.