Alyosha comes into the drawing-room and the conversation is already over. Katerina looks resolute. Ivan stands to take leave, pale, and Alyosha watches him anxiously. She asks them to judge a decision she made in the night. She does not know whether she still loves Dmitri. She feels pity for him, and that is a poor sign of love. If she loved him, she might hate him instead of being sorry. Alyosha thinks she is truthful, and that she does not love Dmitri any more. Ivan, in a subdued voice, says he approves.
She will go to another town and watch over Dmitri all her life. When he is unhappy with that woman, he will find a sister who has sacrificed everything. She will be a god he can pray to. That, she says, he owes her for his treachery and for what she suffered yesterday. She will become an instrument for his happiness, and he must see it all his life. The speech is hurried, and her pride is still smarting. Ivan makes it worse. From any other woman, he says, this would be overstrained, but from her it is genuine, and therefore she is right.
Then he must go to Moscow tomorrow. She cries out that she is glad, and the sorrow of losing a friend comes a moment later. Madame Hohlakov asks, sharp and angry, what about Alyosha's opinion. Alyosha says he cannot believe it. The sorrow was acting, a part played as in a theatre. Perhaps she does not love Dmitri at all, and never has, and Dmitri has never loved her, only esteemed her. Somebody must tell the truth. Ivan, suddenly young, says the more Dmitri insults her the more she loves him. He will not take her hand. He has been tortured too deliberately to forgive her at this moment. He leaves on a line from Schiller, without even a good-bye to Madame Hohlakov.
Alyosha cries after him to come back, then sees that nothing will induce him. It is his fault, he says. He began it. Katerina comes back composed and asks him to take two hundred roubles to a discharged captain named Snegiryov, in Lake Street, in the house of a woman called Kalmikov. Dmitri seized him by the beard and dragged him along the street while his little son ran beside them crying, and everyone laughed. The money is not to stop a lawsuit. It is sympathy from Dmitri's betrothed, not from Dmitri. She vanishes behind the portière before Alyosha can beg her pardon. Madame Hohlakov calls him an angel and says the hysterics are a good sign. Lise, through the door, asks how he has come to be an angel. He tells her it was an awful piece of stupidity, that he has a real sorrow, and he runs out.
