e room, with an occasional glance
at myself. I felt more offended with him than ever. "How can he go
on walking about the room and grinning like that?" was my inward
reflection.

"What are you so angry about?" he asked me suddenly as he halted in
front of my chair.

"I am not in the least angry," I replied (as people always do answer
under such circumstances). "I am merely vexed that you should play-act
to me, and to Bezobiedoff, and to yourself."

"What rubbish!" he retorted. "I never play-act to any one."

"I have in mind our rule of frankness," I replied, "when I tell you that
I am certain you cannot bear this Bezobiedoff any more than I can. He is
an absolute cad, yet for some inexplicable reason or another it pleases
you to masquerade before him."

"Not at all! To begin with, he is a splendid fellow, and--"

"But I tell you it IS so. I also tell you that your friendship for Lubov
Sergievna is founded on the same basis, namely, that she thinks you a
god."

"And I tell you once more that it is not so."

"Oh, I know it for myself," I retorted with the heat of suppressed
anger, and designing to disarm him with my frankness. "I have told you
before, and I repeat it now, that you always seem to like people who say
pleasant things to you, but that, as soon as ever I come to examine
your friendship, I invariably find that there exists no real attachment
between you."

"Oh, but you are wrong," said Dimitri with an angry straightening of the
neck in his collar. "When I like people, neither their praise nor their
blame can make any difference to my opinion of them."

"Well, dreadful though it may seem to you, I confess that I myself often
used to hate my father when he abused me, and to wish that he was dead.
In the same way, you--"

"Speak for yourself. I am very sorry that you could ever have been so--"

"No, no!" I cried as I leapt from my chair and faced him with the
courage of exasperation. "It is for YOURSELF that you ought to feel
sorry--sorry because you never told me a word about this fellow. You
know that was not honourable of you. Nevertheless, I will tell YOU what
I think of you," and, burning to wound him even more than he had wounded
me, I set out to prove to him that he was incapable of feeling any real
affection for anybody, and that I had the best of grounds (as in very
truth I believed I had) for reproaching him. I took great pleasure
in telling him all this, but at the same time forgot that t