a man with two such ideas can't go on
living?"

"Must shoot himself, you mean?"

"Surely you must understand that one might shoot oneself for that
alone? You don't understand that there may be a man, one man out of your
thousands of millions, one man who won't bear it and does not want to."

"All I understand is that you seem to be hesitating.... That's very
bad."

"Stavrogin, too, is consumed by an idea," Kirillov said gloomily, pacing
up and down the room. He had not noticed the previous remark.

"What?" Pyotr Stepanovitch pricked up his ears. "What idea? Did he tell
you something himself?"

"No, I guessed it myself: if Stavrogin has faith, he does not believe
that he has faith. If he hasn't faith, he does not believe that he
hasn't."

"Well, Stavrogin has got something else worse than that in his head,"
Pyotr Stepanovitch muttered peevishly, uneasily watching the turn the
conversation had taken and the pallor of Kirillov.

"Damn it all, he won't shoot himself!" he was thinking. "I always
suspected it; it's a maggot in the brain and nothing more; what a rotten
lot of people!"

"You are the last to be with me; I shouldn't like to part on bad terms
with you," Kirillov vouchsafed suddenly.

Pyotr Stepanovitch did not answer at once. "Damn it all, what is it
now?" he thought again.

"I assure you, Kirillov, I have nothing against you personally as a man,
and always..."

"You are a scoundrel and a false intellect. But I am just the same as
you are, and I will shoot myself while you will remain living."

"You mean to say, I am so abject that I want to go on living."

He could not make up his mind whether it was judicious to keep up such
a conversation at such a moment or not, and resolved "to be guided by
circumstances." But the tone of superiority and of contempt for him,
which Kirillov had never disguised, had always irritated him, and
now for some reason it irritated him more than ever--possibly because
Kirillov, who was to die within an hour or so (Pyotr Stepanovitch still
reckoned upon this), seemed to him, as it were, already only half a man,
some creature whom he could not allow to be haughty.

"You seem to be boasting to me of your shooting yourself."

"I've always been surprised at every one's going on living," said
Kirillov, not hearing his remark.

"H'm! Admitting that's an idea, but..."

"You ape, you assent to get the better of me. Hold your tongue; you
won't understand anything. If the