“Very, extremely.”
Kirillov, who was poor, almost destitute, though he never noticed his poverty, was evidently proud of showing precious weapons, which he had certainly obtained with great sacrifice.
“You still have the same intentions?” Stavrogin asked after a moment’s silence, and with a certain wariness.
“Yes,” answered Kirillov shortly, guessing at once from his voice what he was asking about, and he began taking the weapons from the table.
“When?” Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch inquired still more cautiously, after a pause.
In the meantime Kirillov had put both the boxes back in his trunk, and sat down in his place again.
“That doesn’t depend on me, as you know—when they tell me,” he muttered, as though disliking the question; but at the same time with evident readiness to answer any other question. He kept his black, lustreless eyes fixed continually on Stavrogin with a calm but warm and kindly expression in them.
“I understand shooting oneself, of course,” Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch began suddenly, frowning a little, after a dreamy silence that lasted three minutes. “I sometimes have thought of it myself, and then there always came a new idea: if one did something wicked, or, worse still, something shameful, that is, disgraceful, only very shameful and … ridiculous, such as people would remember for a thousand years and hold in scorn for a thousand years, and suddenly the thought comes: ‘one blow in the temple and there would be nothing more.’ One wouldn’t care then for men and that they would hold one in scorn for a thousand years, would one?”
“You call that a new idea?” said Kirillov, after a moment’s thought.
“I … didn’t call it so, but when I thought it I felt it as a new idea.”