Page 440 - the-brothers-karamazov

sick of it; and though it’s the last time I shall cross its hateful
threshold, still I loathe it.... No, it’s not that either. Is it the
parting with Alyosha and the conversation I had with him?
For so many years I’ve been silent with the whole world and
not deigned to speak, and all of a sudden I reel off a rig-
marole like that.’ certainly might have been the youthful
vexation of youthful inexperience and vanity — vexation
at having failed to express himself, especially with such a
being as Alyosha, on whom his heart had certainly been
reckoning. No doubt that came in, that vexation, it must
have done indeed; but yet that was not it, that was not it
either. ‘I feel sick with depression and yet I can’t tell what I
want. Better not think, perhaps.’
Ivan tried ‘not to think,’ but that, too, was no use. What
made his depression so vexatious and irritating was that it
had a kind of casual, external character — he felt that. Some
person or thing seemed to be standing out somewhere, just
as something will sometimes obtrude itself upon the eye,
and though one may be so busy with work or conversation
that for a long time one does not notice it, yet it irritates and
almost torments one till at last one realises, and removes
the offending object, often quite a trifling and ridiculous
one — some article left about in the wrong place, a hand-
kerchief on the floor, a book not replaced on the shelf, and
so on.
At last, feeling very cross and ill-humoured, Ivan arrived
home, and suddenly, about fifteen paces from the garden
gate, he guessed what was fretting and worrying him.
On a bench in the gateway the valet Smerdyakov was sit-