y's arms.... Mavriky won't
put her into your carriage.... Stay! There's something more important
than the carriage!"

He seized his revolver again. Stavrogin looked at him gravely.

"Very well, kill me," he said softly, almost conciliatorily.

"Foo. Damn it! What a maze of false sentiment a man can get into!" said
Pyotr Stepanovitch, shaking with rage. "Yes, really, you ought to be
killed! She ought simply to spit at you! Fine sort of 'magic boat,'
you are; you are a broken-down, leaky old hulk!... You ought to pull
yourself together if only from spite! Ech! Why, what difference would it
make to you since you ask for a bullet through your brains yourself?"

Stavrogin smiled strangely.

"If you were not such a buffoon I might perhaps have said yes now.... If
you had only a grain of sense..."

"I am a buffoon, but I don't want you, my better half, to be one! Do you
understand me?"

Stavrogin did understand, though perhaps no one else did. Shatov, for
instance, was astonished when Stavrogin told him that Pyotr Stepanovitch
had enthusiasm.

"Go to the devil now, and to-morrow perhaps I may wring something out of
myself. Come to-morrow."

"Yes? Yes?"

"How can I tell?... Go to hell. Go to hell." And he walked out of the
room.

"Perhaps, after all, it may be for the best," Pyotr Stepanovitch
muttered to himself as he hid the revolver.

III

He rushed off to overtake Lizaveta Nikolaevna. She had not got far
away, only a few steps, from the house. She had been detained by Alexey
Yegorytch, who was following a step behind her, in a tail coat, and
without a hat; his head was bowed respectfully. He was persistently
entreating her to wait for a carriage; the old man was alarmed and
almost in tears.

"Go along. Your master is asking for tea, and there's no one to give it
to him," said Pyotr Stepanovitch, pushing him away. He took Liza's arm.

She did not pull her arm away, but she seemed hardly to know what she
was doing; she was still dazed.

"To begin with, you are going the wrong way," babbled Pyotr
Stepanovitch. "We ought to go this way, and not by the garden, and,
secondly, walking is impossible in any case. It's over two miles, and
you are not properly dressed. If you would wait a second, I came in a
droshky; the horse is in the yard. I'll get it instantly, put you in,
and get you home so that no one sees you."

"How kind you are," said Liza graciously.

"Oh, not at all. Any humane man in my position w