Alyosha stopped dead. Rakitin stopped, too.
“What murderer? As though you didn’t know! I’ll bet you’ve thought of it before. That’s interesting, too, by the way. Listen, Alyosha, you always speak the truth, though you’re always between two stools. Have you thought of it or not? Answer.”
“I have,” answered Alyosha in a low voice. Even Rakitin was taken aback.
“What? Have you really?” he cried.
“I ... I’ve not exactly thought it,” muttered Alyosha, “but directly you began speaking so strangely, I fancied I had thought of it myself.”
“You see? (And how well you expressed it!) Looking at your father and your brother Mitya to‐day you thought of a crime. Then I’m not mistaken?”
“But wait, wait a minute,” Alyosha broke in uneasily. “What has led you to see all this? Why does it interest you? That’s the first question.”
“Two questions, disconnected, but natural. I’ll deal with them separately. What led me to see it? I shouldn’t have seen it, if I hadn’t suddenly understood your brother Dmitri, seen right into the very heart of him all at once. I caught the whole man from one trait. These very honest but passionate people have a line which mustn’t be crossed. If it were, he’d run at your father with a knife. But your father’s a drunken and abandoned old sinner, who can never draw the line—if they both let themselves go, they’ll both come to grief.”
“No, Misha, no. If that’s all, you’ve reassured me. It won’t come to that.”
“But why are you trembling? Let me tell you; he may be honest, our Mitya (he is stupid, but honest), but he’s—a sensualist. That’s the very definition and inner essence of him. It’s your father has handed him on his low sensuality. Do you know, I simply wonder at you, Alyosha, how you can have kept your purity. You’re a Karamazov too, you know! In your family sensuality is carried to a disease. But now, these three sensualists are watching one another, with their knives in their belts. The three of them are knocking their heads together, and you may be the fourth.”