Grushenka lived in the busiest part of the town, near the cathedral square, in a small wooden lodge in the courtyard of the widow Morozov. The house was a large stone building of two storeys, old and very ugly. The widow lived a secluded life with her two unmarried nieces, also elderly. She had no need to let the lodge. Everyone knew she had taken Grushenka in four years before, solely to please her kinsman, the merchant Samsonov, the girl's protector. The jealous old man had wanted the widow to keep a sharp eye on her. The sharp eye soon proved unnecessary. The widow seldom met her and did not worry her. Grushenka lived economically. Her maid was a girl of twenty, Fenya, who did the work of the house. She was waiting. She had told Dmitri that she was going to spend the evening with her old man, Kuzma Kuzmitch, and would be there till late, counting up his money. She always spent one whole evening a week with him making up his accounts. They locked themselves in. She had sat ten minutes with Kuzma and come back, running, for fear of meeting Dmitri. It was quite dark when Rakitin and Alyosha entered, and the rooms were not lighted. She was lying on the big hard sofa in the drawing-room. Rakitin was curious about the cap and the dress. She told him not to be so curious. She was expecting a message.
She had expected Dmitri, or the message, and what came into the room was the novice. She knew why Rakitin had brought him. She sat on Alyosha's knee. She talked of Katerina Ivanovna. She said she had wanted, once, to get the monk into her hands, because his pure face had shamed her. Champagne was brought. Rakitin taunted him with the elder, and with the smell in the cell. Grushenka crossed herself and leapt off his knee. Then Alyosha spoke in a firm and loud voice. Rakitin, don't taunt me with having rebelled against God. I don't want to feel angry with you, so you must be kinder. I have lost a treasure such as you have never had, and you cannot judge me now. He had come, he said, to find a wicked soul, and he had been wicked and evil himself, and he had found a true sister, a loving heart. She had pity on him. Agrafena Alexandrovna, I am speaking of you. You have raised my soul from the depths.
She told them the story she had heard as a child from Matryona, the story of the onion. A wicked woman died and was in the lake, and her guardian angel remembered that she had once pulled up an onion in her garden and given it to a beggar woman. God said, take that onion, hold it out to her, and if you can pull her out of the lake, let her come into paradise. She held it out. Other sinners caught hold of her so as to be pulled out with her, and she kicked them. The onion broke. Grushenka said she had done nothing but give away one onion in all her life, and that was the only good deed she had done. Alyosha answered that he had only given her an onion, nothing but a tiny little onion. She went to the table, opened a drawer, and put a twenty-five rouble note into Rakitin's hand. She had promised him twenty-five roubles if he would bring Alyosha. Rakitin cried that it was nonsense. She said she owed it to him. He had reckoned on receiving the money later, without Alyosha seeing it, and now the note was in his pocket and he was ashamed.
She was waiting for the officer, the man who had ruined her at seventeen, and she hated him and she would go. Fenya came with the news of the carriage for Mokroe. He was whistling. Grushenka cried that she would crawl to him like a beaten dog, and at the same time she ran. She shouted after Alyosha from the window. Give her greetings to his brother Mitya, and tell him not to remember evil against her, though she had brought him misery. Tell him, in her words, that Grushenka has fallen to a scoundrel, and not to him, noble heart. And add that she loved him only one hour, only one short hour, so let him remember that hour all his life. Grushenka tells you to. She ended in sobs. The window was shut. Rakitin, left with the money, said Alyosha was not Christ and he was not Judas.
