go, abroad, not long before you went to America.
... At least, as far as I can recall it now."

"It's your phrase altogether, not mine. Your own, not simply the sequel
of our conversation. 'Our' conversation it was not at all. It was a
teacher uttering weighty words, and a pupil who was raised from the
dead. I was that pupil and you were the teacher."

"But, if you remember, it was just after my words you joined their
society, and only afterwards went away to America."

"Yes, and I wrote to you from America about that. I wrote to you about
everything. Yes, I could not at once tear my bleeding heart from what
I had grown into from childhood, on which had been lavished all the
raptures of my hopes and all the tears of my hatred.... It is difficult
to change gods. I did not believe you then, because I did not want to
believe, I plunged for the last time into that sewer.... But the seed
remained and grew up. Seriously, tell me seriously, didn't you read all
my letter from America, perhaps you didn't read it at all?"

"I read three pages of it. The two first and the last. And I glanced
through the middle as well. But I was always meaning..."

"Ah, never mind, drop it! Damn it!" cried Shatov, waving his hand. "If
you've renounced those words about the people now, how could you have
uttered them then?... That's what crushes me now."

"I wasn't joking with you then; in persuading you I was perhaps
more concerned with myself than with you," Stavrogin pronounced
enigmatically.

"You weren't joking! In America I was lying for three months on straw
beside a hapless creature, and I learnt from him that at the very time
when you were sowing the seed of God and the Fatherland in my heart, at
that very time, perhaps during those very days, you were infecting the
heart of that hapless creature, that maniac Kirillov, with poison... you
confirmed false malignant ideas in him, and brought him to the verge of
insanity.... Go, look at him now, he is your creation... you've seen him
though."

"In the first place, I must observe that Kirillov himself told me that
he is happy and that he's good. Your supposition that all this was going
on at the same time is almost correct. But what of it? I repeat, I was
not deceiving either of you."

"Are you an atheist? An atheist now?"

"Yes."

"And then?"

"Just as I was then."

"I wasn't asking you to treat me with respect when I began the
conversation. With your intellect you might have