The Weight of Moral Distinctions — The Brothers Karamazov

Mitya's great secret lands with a hiss. He confesses the money was his own in the moral sense: fifteen hundred roubles of Katerina Ivanovna's three thousand, sewn in a rag around his neck for a month while he told the town he had squandered the whole sum at Mokroe and let everyone reckon three thousand gone. Not from his father, he insists again and again; from Katya, whom he betrayed just as he ran to Grushenka, spending half the trust in two days and hiding the other half as a locket of shame. The lawyers' faces lengthen because this is not the alibi they wanted for parricide.

He explains the distinction that has tortured him: a scoundrel who might still return half and confess to Katya is not a thief who spent the reserve; he carried the amulet until the road from Fenya to Perhotin, tore it off in the dark, and in his own court became a thief for life, destroying the dream of saying he was vile but not a robber. The prosecutors laugh, call it nerves, suggest he might simply have asked Katya for help after confessing the first half, and write down his admission that he almost did, which horrifies him as filthier than theft because she might have given it to be revenged on him.

The prosecutor's vexation shows: he cannot see why fifteen hundred hidden from Katya should cost more agony than the three thousand already gossiped through town, why Mitya cried that Siberia would be easier than confessing. Mitya answers with the purpose of his calculation for Grushenka and his father, the month of calling himself thief in his heart, that a thief is lower than a scoundrel, the tavern fights and the attack on Fyodor fed by that rag, and the line that one cannot live or die a scoundrel, that tearing the amulet mattered more than Siberia for Grigory. He breaks down over the bravado about three thousand, the two hundred witnesses who heard what he now calls rot from pride, and the rag he dropped in the market-place; when they pick at the landlady's cap, he cries that they torture him for sport and begs them not to write his plan to beg Katya.

At the rain-streaked window he thinks of Phoebus and suicide, then asks only about Grushenka's fate; they reassure him on that score, offer tea, and prepare witnesses while eight o'clock and exhaustion end the night's interrogation, his heart sullied but the greater secret finally spoken.