Page 781 - the-idiot

‘What! didn’t I tell you? Ha, ha, ha! I thought I had. Why,
I received a letter, you know, to be handed over—‘From
whom? To whom?’
But it was difficult, if not impossible, to extract anything
from Lebedeff. All the prince could gather was, that the let-
ter had been received very early, and had a request written
on the outside that it might be sent on to the address given.
‘Just as before, sir, just as before! To a certain person, and
from a certain hand. The individual’s name who wrote the
letter is to be represented by the letter A.—‘
‘What? Impossible! To Nastasia Philipovna? Nonsense!’
cried the prince.
‘It was, I assure you, and if not to her then to Rogojin,
which is the same thing. Mr. Hippolyte has had letters, too,
and all from the individual whose name begins with an A.,’
smirked Lebedeff, with a hideous grin.
As he kept jumping from subject to subject, and for-
getting what he had begun to talk about, the prince said
nothing, but waited, to give him time.
It was all very vague. Who had taken the letters, if letters
there were? Probably Vera—and how could Lebedeff have
got them? In all probability, he had managed to steal the
present letter from Vera, and had himself gone over to Liza-
betha Prokofievna with some idea in his head. So the prince
concluded at last.
‘You are mad!’ he cried, indignantly.
‘Not quite, esteemed prince,’ replied Lebedeff, with
some acerbity. ‘I confess I thought of doing you the ser-
vice of handing the letter over to yourself, but I decided

0 The Idiot